I think you did an excellent job of measuring the direct benefits of transit but you did a much poorer job of looking at the indirect costs and benefits of transit.

I don't know if you spent much time looking at this report.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/pdf/energy_task_force.pdf

or this one

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_green-cities.html

What stands out is that dense cities and dense parts of cities are dramatically less energy intensive on a per capita basis than more spread out regions.

Its not just that transit in Manhattan is dramatically more efficient than mass transit in say Fresno with much higher utilization rates, but people are also much more likely to walk to work or for shopping in Manhattan than in less dense place like Fresno.

If your primary means of getting around is by auto, than your city needs lots of parking for the autos. All of that space for parking means that more goods and services are spread out. That in turn leads to less walking in the neighborhood and a further need for more driving and less walking. That also means that your city probably will pancake out and never develop density.

Developement is path dependent. People taking transit aren't bring a car with them. That means that areas near transit corridors tend to end up being more walkable. That in turn means less driving in that neighborhood, lowering emissions. Areas with lots of rail connections tend to densify over time.

There are lags between the build out of the rail system and transit oriented development that follows. There are also network effects for transit usage. In the Bay Area, you have more transit villages and housing prices have risen higher near Bart stations than near the light rail stations in San Jose in part because right now Bart goes to more places, but also because Bart has been established longer.

With your robocar idea, my concern is that you are ignoring the high indirect costs of parking.

see here

http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf

and much more throughly here.

http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking/dp/1884829988

Do these figures take into account the fact that traffic congestion decreases the efficiency of private cars?

Your numbers make some light rail projects (like Salt Lake City) look very good. However, you should consider system-wide effects. Basically, the SL rail system replaced the most heavily used bus routes. Other bus routes were reconfigured to feed the light rail system. Light rail looks good, but the bus system looks much worse after adding light rail to the system. Adding light rail may have actually reduced the energy efficiency of the public transport system.

They are claiming 80 Wh/mi for the Aptera 2 and they claim they can do that at 55mph. That works out to 272BTU/p-m (solo).

http://aptera2e.org/aptera-2e-specs/

It would be interesting to dig out comparable figures for other "cities". (San Jose is a town which annexed way too many subdivisions.) I'm a native Chicagoan, and take the city buses and trains everywhere. Late at night, there may be very few passengers, but overall, I expect the efficiency figures are way different from San Jose's.
But this is only one facet of a national strategic problem I've wondered about for a while. Since WW II, the infrastructure of the United States has been largely expanded or rebuilt around the single-passenger automobile. Now that the cheap oil is gone, we need to move to more efficient transport. But efficiency depends critically on density, and the "normal" suburban density can't support public transit. The outermost suburbs will become slums or abandoned as gas prices continue to rise, but I don't see good strategic options for increasing population density. You can't really infill quarter acre lots.

it would be helpful if a publication date is included with the article; i viewed it at:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

and realized that i had no idea when it was written and that in the future this would become murkier...

Fat people in cars eat as much if not more than people who exercise bt commuting. My food consumption goes down when I exercise, not up. I also happen to be a vegan, so even better.

Get it straight.

Now, for questions:

In your considerations have you included the massive subsidies and incentives government has infused into the auto industry that is fast becoming a zero employer due to automation? Seiously, the costs, both financial, environmental and social, as well as the innefficiency of private over public and human powered (cycling, running, walking, etc...)transit is ridiculous to dispute. What is in dispute is that a society that, by this time, should realize it has responsibility to future generations still acts with the ignorance of the past. The only difference from the past is that such ignorance is fast becoming willful and dangerous.

You may be interested to know that there is a well-established system of carpooling to and from Washington DC and northern Virginia.

http://www.slug-lines.com/

Because it requires at least three passengers per car, a car of "sluggers" is quite efficient.

I think this shows simply the importance of designing a good, heavily-used transit system rather than a bad one.

San Jose VTA has become a bit of a poster child for "badly designed".

As an important point which you touched on tangentially: When you figure in manufacturing costs, rail transit will look better compared to cars (and possibly even scooters), because the vehicles have less steel per passenger than cars (and possibly even scooters) and last significantly longer (50 years for some transit vehicles, though 30 is more normal; 5-15 for cars, unfortunately.)

Brad,
You point out that there are considerable external costs and benefits to both auto-centric transportation and transit-centric systems. You also seem to recognize that it is impossible to speak about transportation without also discussing its relationship to land use. What do you say to those who see transit as an important component that enables safer, healthier, more livable communities? Wouldn't you agree that encouraging compact, walkable, transit oriented communities is an attractive way to reduce the need to supply copious amounts of parking which is expensive at $2-3 thousand a space for surface lots and about $15 thousand per space for structured parking to construct, not including long term maintenance. According to Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking, the economics of free parking is what drives our destinations further and further apart.

What are your thoughts on the effects of an auto-centric environment on public health? Some connections are obvious 4,000+/- pedestrian deaths each year in the US, 40,000+/- annual deaths in motor vehicle crashes...
(http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx)

other connections are being made by health professionals between health and our built environment:

365,000+/- annual deaths due to sedentary living (Mokdad, A.H., et al. 2004. Actual causes of death in the US. JAMA 291: 1238-45)

$40,000,000,000+/- direct cost to tax payers due to inactivity and poor nutrition. (www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/
(Obesity Research, Finkelstein et.al., Jan, ’04)

It appears that the best way to help people get the recommended 30-60 minutes of aerobic exercise per day is to create an environment where they get that exercise without even noticing it, for example: walking to/from work, school, or a transit stop. To make this lifestyle feasible it requires destinations to be within close proximity. Transit oriented density makes for a much more livable environment when compared with auto-oriented density (places like Los Angeles which has the density of a city but the relative parking supply of a suburb). To that point, fixed guideway transit is the only way to send a clear message to private developers that it is okay to reduce their parking supply because the presence of the transit infrastructure signals that service will continue. (Bus routes can change overnight, but its hard to re-route a streetcar)

On the earlier discussion of infrastructure funding, I agree that we have a pretty dumb system in America. The Barchan foundation has done an excellent job of analyzing the way that the world's infrastructure is paid for, and I would be for a system much like much of the rest of the developed world uses where contracts for public asset for design/build/operations/maintenance are bid together as a package instead of separately. (You'd design and build something very differently if you were the entity that was ultimately going to have to create a system to fund the operations and maintenance of that asset.)
http://www.barchanfoundation.com/

I only propose this approach for urban developments were the market can be supported, and mounting evidence suggests that generational preferences in the U.S. are shifting towards a more urban lifestyle.
http://www.rclco.com/pdf/Gwinnett_Redevelopment_Forum-Gregg_Logan-8-10-09.pdf

Transit is not especially viable for rural areas and by accommodating new population growth in an urban form we can ensure that those great rural areas stay rural, let rural residents drive robo-electric vehicles, but keep them out of the city, we don't want to inflate our costs of living by having to provide parking garages.

Your data source is flawed, simply put Galveston DOES NOT have light-rail, it DOES have a diesel powered replica trolley that IIRC was damaged by hurricane IKE, it is NOT a very good example of light-rail, why not try Houston (Which likely data was not available for when this dated data was collected)..

The Galveston trolley's capacity is more along the line of a city bus, where Houston MetroRail cars have a capacity of 220 passenger per unit & the single operator can operate two units by MU, with computer remote control. That one operator can carry more passengers than buses, as typical transit buses max out at 50 passengers with standees & that one 2 car articulated train can carry 440 passengers at peak travel times..

TRE Trinity Railway Express in Dallas & Fort Worth can carry closer to 800 passengers per scheduled trip in a multiple car bi-level consist with conventional passenger diesel locomotives that are geared for commuter rail speeds on a route that is 35+ miles long..

Get real, get data from APTA on ridership in the many forms of transit they represent from buses to the New York City MTA, which operates more passenger rail cars than any company in the USA.. (New York MTA includes 3 bus systems, subways, Long Island Railroad (The oldest US railroad operating under it's original charter), Metro-North which operates from Manhattan to Connecticut & on a line in New Jersey to parts of New York along the New Jersey/New York state border, as well as a line running North along the Husdon River..

Howard Bingham, Houston, Texas

Why can't you move to metric units? 90% of the world only understands metric. I am British so I still vaguely understand your units.

So far as I understand your argument, it is far less valid in Europe and Japan, where some inter-city trains run with a 80% load factor (as high as planes) and some countries' electric trains consume less source energy than a small diesel car (both quoted at the average load factor of about 33%, not the peak load factor).

Also, if trains were allowed to be as flimsy and unsafe as motorcycles or scooters, the energy consumption would probably plummet. New trains are strong enough that most passengers are likely to survive a head-on collision at 100 km/hr (60 mph. In some ways this is an absurdly high safety standard compared to cars let alone scooters. In occasional British train accidents at 150 km/hr, there haven't been that many deaths.

So why don't you make buses and trains lighter and save 50% of the energy? From my visits to the USA, I think you've developed such sprawl since WW II that this explains much of your problems in making public transport work. Putting buildings far apart actually makes it necessary to use cars to get to them. That in turn makes public transport less viable. If you visit a European city such as Amsterdam or Zurich you see the opposite tendency.

Regardless of energy use, I can't see battery electric vehicles making huge progress unless we see a battery breakthrough. We've been waiting/hoping for one for decades, if not a century. Lithium-ion costs more than lead-acid (although it's lighter). The promised savings on fuel (mainly because electricity isn't taxed and diesel or petrol is) are set to be more than offset by extra costs of leasing batteries (or occasional huge expenses of $10,000s to buy a new battery pack).

When we choose to drive, we are adding our car to the existing transportation modes in operation. Jumping on the bus doesn't add significantly to the fuel consumption of the bus, but it will run whether or not we get on.

Therefore, the BTU's per PM figure for a car should be added to the figure for the bus, train, or other option not chosen, like this:

1. Bus --4300 BTU/PM
2. SUV + Bus --8200 BTU/PM
3. Electric car + Bus --6400 BTU/PM

It's not as if we can cause the bus to stop running by not riding it. We can only choose not drive our own car.

Another concept to consider is the efficiency of highways vs. train tracks. For medium-distance rail from suburbs to cities, the trains use only a set of tracks which require very little maintenance over many years. Cars require a highway with 2-4 lanes on each side, the surface of which needs to be periodically replaced at a huge expense.

It seems to me that in your effort to promote robocars you've done a disservice to mass transit modes by selectively using the statistics and underplaying the value of increased ridership and economies of scale. Recycling plastic, for example, is inefficient on a small scale, but at a certain critical point it becomes profitable. It would be more so if the environmental cost of plastic were embedded into it's retail cost.

City buses would benefit from hybrid technology, which would mitigate the inefficiency of their frequent starting and stopping.

I think your use of the 1.57 passenger average figure is misleading. When most of us make a commuting choice, it is not with 1.57 people in mind, but simply ourselves. Your figures for car efficiency should be based on 1 single passenger. There is no such thing as 1.57 passengers. If and when we consider taking another passenger along with us, then we can simply make our decision based on nearly doubling our efficiency, etc.

But again, that is subject to the fact that the bus or light rail would run with or without us, so we must add our car's energy use to that of the bus.

It seems to me that you've gone out of your way to trash mass transit. The fact that you've ridden it or your bicycle doesn't absolve you of that.

The very same stats can be interpreted to show a brighter future for mass transit, and I think it would help our country more for you to use your considerable researching skill and efforts to that end.

I think the author or someone on the same wavelength (I almost wrote "wavelink") has commented that using smaller, lighter vehicles designed for much
slower speeds would improve energy efficiency a lot. That sounds reasonable to me. But I note that the very high speed Japanese "East" line rates excellent. Do the laws of physics (where I think resistance increases proportional to the square of the velocity, something like that) get bent with high speed non-levitating trains? obviously I can see that a long train presents a proportionally small area to atmospheric resistance but I would expect that friction to be a huge factor. Any comment?

Your numbers assume that all occupants in a car are passengers. If the driver is operating the car to "pick up the kids at school" or "drop off the spouse at the airport," then they themselves are not a passenger, and the car has exactly zero passengers for half the trip.

You're including potentially empty subways while assuming taxicabs are never without a fare.

How do the numbers compare if the driver is only truly a passenger, say, 80% of the time?

As far as public transport vs cars, there are cases where cars could not possibly provide the service, regardless of energy efficiency. For instance, on average in 2007 the NYC subway system transported 388,802 people into the business district of Manhattan between 8am and 9am. To get the same with cars would take at least 167 inbound lanes of bridges and tunnels.

http://frumin.net/ation/2009/08/whats_capacity_go_to_do_with_m.html

Hi Brad, I recently rediscovered this site after a related discussion on high-speed rail at work. This site is simply the best analysis of mass transit efficiency I've ever seen. You noted in a comment that you don't list Amtrak because it is not considered a form of transit, but I think it would be very useful to show these numbers considering current debates around high-speed rail in the US. Would you mind adding Amtrak to your post charts or (at least) including the BTU per passenger mile number in a reply to my comment? Thanks!

Btw, the 2011 Insight EPA combined MPG appears to be 40/43 and Consumer Reports (CR) got 29/45 in real road tests (38 combined). Am I correct in thinking that the Prius is currently the best transit competitor in the US? CR reported 32/55 in real road tests (44 combined), EPA says 51/48. My experience is that CR numbers are more accurate.

So air travel looks not so bad by this chart... well, that's because per-passenger it isn't so much worse than driving the whole way. But it's the distance that is the real problem. The problem with private cars isn't the inherent efficiency, it's the idea that private cars let people live in spread out sprawl and drive everywhere. If people live near transit, then they go less total miles and use less land in sprawling McMansions. It's definitely less efficient to have a bus or train go through winding subdivisions versus cars! The real answer is not to build these ridiculous subdivisions. But anyway, there are also issues of infrastructure and quality of life, because a traffic jam is a lot worse than sitting in a crowded moving train, and roads need more repair over years than rail, not to mention have more dangerous accidents and cause more stress...

Brad,

You've done a very good job here. You have obviously made an honest appraisal that was motivated solely by a desire to inform. I do admit that I am flummoxed to learn you were surprised by these findings. If, as you contend, you have been analyzing these issues for decades, I wonder why it comes as a surprise? It doesn't to me although I am woefully late to the party.

Nevertheless, the real critique I offer concerns the singular, almost myopic focus with analysis using BTU or CO2 as the coin of the realm rather than total life-cycle economic costing. Utterly absent in your analysis is the impact of capital costs, and thus total life-cycle costs, from competing solutions. Fine, if we need to impute a cost for CO2 emission, let's do so. But let's assure ourselves it reflects actual costs in a rationally-functioning global marketplace, not some politically-inspired artificial cost imposed by corrupt, rent-seeking boosters of alternative energy. And if capital costs are unrealistically low at a given moment, as they are in 2012 — the yield on the 10-year Treasury is below 1.5% — then let's agree to use a longer-term average.

But none of these recommendations is worth a moment's notice if we're just counting carbon or BTUs to make our choices. You can't take those to the bank. People can't exchange them for groceries. They can't buy an iPhone with them. You can't purchase a tanker of Venezuelan crude oil with them, etc. Long-range economic planning, including energy policy, obligates us to look at net present value dollars where energy serves merely as one input. Sure, we need to properly assess the costs of all impacting externalities like pollution, climate and so forth. Unfortunately, when discussing this topic, the largest pollution problems we face are polluted public policy analysis due to economic myopia compounded by junk science-driven environmental advocacy.

I hope in future, some measure of rational economic analysis can find its way into our carbon and BTU counting. Then we might start making some sensible public policy choices, because our energy and transportation infrastructure public policy choices will be competing, side by side, with other public policy initiatives like health care, education, food safety, security and a thousand other concerns.

Joseph Toomey
Author, "Change You Can REALLY Believe In: The Obama Legacy of Broken Promises and Failed Policies"

"That's because the transit is running anyway, so the incremental cost of carrying one more passenger is indeed less than just about any private vehicle. It is similarly green to carpool in somebody else's car that's going your way.

As such, these numbers should not make you feel better about taking your car instead of the train. Particularly solo, since solo drivers are what make the car's average efficiency worse while carpoolers make it better."

True, but it makes me feel a lot better about voting AGAINST new public transport projects. San Jose examples include BART extensions and the "fast" train to LA. Not that I had trouble voting against them before. The Bart extension to San Jose was put on the ballot several times and the money "redirected" to other projects each time. Seen the Bart extension to San Jose lately?

Hi Brad, I referenced your essay in a FB discussion about public transit, and a question came up about passenger ferries over water, specifically the Vallejo to SF ferry. Do you have any numbers for water passenger transport? Where would they fall on your graph?

Sigh. I accept your numbers and the conclusions you draw from them. But do you really think the solution is new cars? New, expensive cars that most of us will never be able to afford to buy? The solution is not new stuff. Any new stuff. The solution is to stop manufacturing stuff, ESPECIALLY cars. For one thing cars are the worst thing we've ever invented,; all they've done is allow us to live an insane distance from where we conduct all of our other activities and to fill the intervening space with asphalt to drive and park our cars on. This is insane. Okay, the infrastructure exists, we're gonna need cars for awhile while we transition to a more walkable infrastructure (although of course this won't happen; we'll swallow the planet whole before we make significant cultural changes) but we have all the cars we'll ever need and then some. What happens to cars when we're done with them in the first world? They're sent to the third world, where they are reconditioned and used for another couple of decades. We don't need any more cars. Ever. Nor do we need more mass transit. We need to re-think our whole way of living from the ground up. Of course I'm enough of a realist to know this will not happen, but I also know that building new cars won't really change much. Our culture is structurally incapable of stopping it's destructiveness or even slowing it down, and barring a miracle or catastrophe we're probably just plain screwed.

Wonderful discussion on some of the energy realities behind various transportation types. Thanks for all the work you put into this.
I have done some of my own studies on this subject matter and must generally agree with your conclusions. What became obvious to me was that cars are far more efficient than most other powered transport methods if ride-sharing is used. Adding some trip consolidation and planning will make the car becomes a top contender.
Jet aircraft are also moving into much higher efficiency ranges with new highly efficient ducted fan engines and upcoming fuselage designs, planes will use 50% less fuel. That really puts a crimp into the ultra-expensive high speed rail that is often touted by many.
Thanks again for compiling and analyzing this very important and relevant topic.

Brad, thank you for the excellent post. It was presented in simplicity and kept objective and based on good data so far as I can tell.

I'm surprised by the difficulty many commenters have to appreciate the effort you have made to keep this post accurate and unbiased, and respond to any comments that find you at fault for any reason. Any such post or essay should be approached with skepticism, but many of these commenters are just directly negative. I think you have made the point quite clear that you are not attempting to bash or promote any particular form of transportation. Only to present data as you revealed them in your research.

One question that I have that I didn't see addressed (hopefully I didn't miss somewhere), did you in any way account for energy losses due to accidents, damaged and totaled automobiles, and energy to sustain medical practices required due to accidents. I am sure this is incredibly difficult to quantify, but as I imagine medical equipment is probably very energy intensive to produce, maintain, and operate, it may be a significant consideration regarding the total energy impact of automobile use.

Of course accidents with mass transit also occur, but I believe the death and injury toll associated is far less per travelled mile.

Thank you.

Brad,

I appreciate your posts on this topic; and even more so your honesty in your attempt to come to some "true" totals regarding the efficiencies of public/mass transit systems.

I'm especially appreciative of the fact that you include the point regarding population density as being one of the KEY factors of the "efficiency" of systems like the NYC subway; and that absent such densities, such a system simply ISN'T implementable elsewhere.

BUT... one point though that is STILL missing from the "high density urban public transport system" -- and to my mind (once you see it) it is a glaringly OBVIOUS one -- is that unlike private cars elsewhere, it really ISN'T a true "door to door" cost. What is so glaringly missing? Elevators.

That's right, elevators.

Plain and simple people (and every "analysis" I have ever seen) simply IGNORES this aspect (and it's costs, both to build, maintain and operate) as if it were NOT a part of the equation (or had zero cost/energy).

But of course it IS part of the equation, and it DOES have costs & energy expenditure. The urban world is NOT 2-dimensional, it's 3-dimensional -- and transit systems (expending energy) MUST exist to enable/facilitate that 3rd dimension.

Moreover, no system like the NYC subway could be anywhere NEAR as "efficient" as it is without the high-density population -- both in terms of residential point of origin, as well as final destination -- WITHOUT those elevators, people simply would NOT (could not) live in a 20+ story building and/or work in a 40+ story office tower... there is simply no way that they would walk up/down (much less carry goods) THAT many flights of stairs. (IOW absent elevators, people would {and did/do} live AND work in shorter buildings, which then means lower density).

So the person who lives on say the 10th floor of building A and who works across town (or indeed even right next door) on the 23rd floor of building B, tends to simply take for granted that there is ENERGY being expended (and a major capital investment as well as maintenance costs) to both lower and raise their body those 10 & 23 floors... in both directions, and at each end. So the claim that they simply "walk" between buildings, or that they take the "efficient" subway... is to simply & wholly ignore/dismiss the fact that the walking/transit is NOT truly "door to door"; thus the claim is a false one, it is "incomplete" in terms of energy & systems.

By contrast, people who live in (generally single or stair-access double or at most triple story) suburban homes or apartment buildings, and then commute via private vehicle to some similar ground-level (or again at most "walk-up") work location... well THEIR "transit" IS in fact invariably the full total "door to door" cost. That is to say, there is no additional "machinery" (and fuel or electrical energy) used to convey them from their home to their car, or from the car to the office/factory/store.

What that means, is that when urban systems are compared against suburban systems... the comparison is fundamentally DISHONEST.

Moreover the costs of those elevators (capital construction a well as maintenance & operation) are far from trivial. (See this article -- http://www.facilitiesnet.com/elevators/article/Economics-of-Elevators-Facilities-Management-Elevators-Feature--1539 -- for some idea of that). And of course those systems are often VERY inefficient: they serve only a relatively small number of people, are generally empty (or nearly empty) for fully half of their operations (and moreover expend nearly the same energy to move when empty as they do when full {it isn't merely the weight of the elevator car, but also the counterweight}).

I'd also like to note one other (different) thing -- yet it is also something that is falsely allocated -- and that is (especially in regards to exurban or rural people) the "cost of building maintaining the roads". This is frequently cited as some "subsidy" to those living in the rural/exurban areas. What that ignores of course is that those roads exist PRIMARILY for other purposes: take Agriculture as one main example, the roads give machinery ready access to farm fields, and we're not talking about just the tractors and/or harvesters, but also the trucks that haul the produce... that is to say carry the food. Where? Well primarily INTO the cities.

Likewise with the freeway system -- it wasn't built for and doesn't exist SOLELY (or even primarily) for suburban commuter traffic -- rather it is chiefly used to via trucks to transport GOODS from one city to another (as well as from various rural or exurban or suburban {NIMBY} processing plants and factories and distribution centers).

The whole point being that the extremely "high density" urban environments CANNOT exist without that entire "network" of roads and vehicles to support it. Neither NYC (nor any other major metropolis) is even capable of producing more than a trivial fraction of it's own food, much less the raw materials or finished goods.

And any analysis that tries to separate the "countryside" and make it seem like it should operate in a similar fashion to the "high density city" -- but which DOESN'T take that into account...

Well, let's be honest; such an analysis is "disconnected" from reality, and in a very childishly ignorant or oblivious fashion. It's akin to (literally) the child that thinks food just "magically" appears in the refrigerator on an as needed basis; or that mommy/daddy obtain "money" (from an apparently endless/infinite supply) by just punching numbers into some ATM machine, or merely handing over some "piece of paper" to the bank teller; and then said child wondering WHY people need to "work" or go to "jobs".

The urbanite (and that includes many clueless academics an bureaucrats -- especially those raised in "privileged" home) is often essentially JUST as clueless about (or worse being disingenuous and willfully ignoring) what all happens out in "flyover" land; or worse who think that all those people "out there" should "ride public transport" instead of driving trucks around (I mean TRUCKS, really?)

Anyway... just some food for thought.

I have seen these numbers on US transit energy inefficiency in a number of places, and I think that they are widely misunderstood. The first thing is that, as you allude to, that energy efficiency of transit is strongly correlated with ridership. The US has favored auto-centric transportation and land use planning for decades which has resulted in low population densities and high levels of automobile use, which makes transit operations less viable. However, since public transit is federally mandated, most US transit systems operate with lower utilization rates (persons to seats) and this results in low energy efficiency.

However, as transit supportive transportation and land use policies get implemented, ridership tends to increase and this generally results in much higher energy efficiency. You do touch on this in your article.

One important thing that should be mentioned however, is that transit ridership has a significant impact on passenger miles. People who use transit tend to use walking and biking for a significant percentage of their trips. This means that if two people living in the same neighborhood who also commute to the same business district, with one of them traveling by car and the other transit; the person who drives will tend to make all of their trips by the car and significantly more miles than the transit rider. For example, the transit rider will tend to make non-commute trips by foot or bicycle either within the business district or in their own neighborhood, while the driver make go all over town to make the same sort of trips.

The holy grail of energy efficiency in transportation is walking and biking. High quality transit (especially grade-separated rail) is key to impacting land use and creating walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods; and therefore, this kind of public transit tends to have the biggest overall positive impact on transportation energy use.

In Toronto we have a streetcar/tram network of 11 lines mainly in the downtown and older part of the city. The 501 Queen Car has a 29 km. route just north of Lake Ontario. The 504 King car has over 80,000 boardings per day. The streetcar system carries over 350,000 passengers per weekday and travel mainly on city streets in mixed traffic. Three lines are separated. Most passenger are going downtown and supplements 2 heavy rail subway lines. Where would you put all those vehicles with your premise.