That San Jose Light rail is at the top doesn't surprise me. Most of the time, I see 2 light rails, attached in tandem -- and both of these trains together carry about 2-3 passengers!. Perhaps San Jose light rail has a policy where each rider needs to have his/her own train car...

for every other option you've only counted efficiency from motor output to distance travelled, so counting a larger portion for cyclists is IMO unreasonable. You could count source to motor as well for the others but that would get ugly fast. So lets just look at cyclist output per mile covered. I'm going to work in ISO units then convert to your wacky ones.

A mediocre cyclist can put out 150W and gets about 20kph from that, or 8J/km. Which is roughly 512 BTU/hr and 12.5mph according to google. So that's about 41 BTU/mile, not even slightly close to the number you came up with above. Interestingly though, it is slightly more than the electric car. Hmm.

Now, certainly if a fat person living in the US was to eat the usual US diet and then ride a bike, you could reasonably blow that number out by a significant chunk. But by rights you should only consider the marginal increase in food consumption, not the gross number. Of course, if you want to consider where the fuel comes from then the coal that powers the generator that feeds the grid that charges the car should be taken into account too. You could also factor in the cost of making the car and bike, but that would also not favour the electric toys. But countering that is the extended life expectancy of the cyclist so their lifetime recsource use goes up, favouring passive transport.

I assume that to go from about 50 BTU per mile to 1500 you've rated people at 25-30% efficient (reasonable) then multiplied by 10 for your fictional "only human food has an energy cost in its acquisition" example.

I think it would be useful to include embodied energy in your calculations too. So heavy rail drops a bit because over 50+ years the cost of a big steel rail and big steel railcar is pretty low, but over 5 years (if you're lucky) the electric car/scooter start to look a bit sad. electric cars also suffer the same problem as mass transit - they only really pay off if you do a lot of miles. So the taxi operator in Vancouver who drives his Prius fleet almost continuously wins big (and gets about 2-3 times the expected mileage out of a set of batteries), but some bunny who buys one "to be green" and drives 5000 miles/year would do us all a favour if they simply burnt the cash instead (and took taxis).

But then, that favours cyclists again. Even a carbon fibre and titanium bicycle looks pretty good next to equally exotic materials in the electric car but with 500x more of them. I do wonder if by "scooter" you mean the $100 things from Taiwan with 12V/7AH SLAs in them. Those are all recyclable, but unfortunately their life is short because they load the battery way too high. The more expensive ones work better but cost more (and weigh more, use more expensive materials).

Well done on the blog post regarding energy per mile. As I understand it, and appreciate it, the main point is simply that the true nature of the petroleum use for human transportation is counterintuitive, or at least contraintuitive. In a society where 'moral choices' are affected so heavily by the currents of discussion in the society as whole,(e.g. mass media, Oprah, PTA, political ads), and this discussion is rarely informed by hard numbers and end to end analysis but rather by emotional appeals to vague concepts, the reminder of the true nature of these issues is very valuable. If only CNN would use 10% of its 24 hour coverage to discuss these subjects in analytical fashion, we could actually make progress in improving the entire world.
And thats the point of this article that I like so much. Issues like transportation need to be looked at from the entire world. Not just the whole surface of the globe, but conceptually including the soup to nuts analysis of everything affected, not just the microcosm of the green this or the green that.
Well done, Brad.

Everyone who starts to get serious about transportation rediscovers the importance of load factor and tare. Did you deliberately choose an inflammatory summary? The bland summary is that the statistics show that nationwide average transit uses 60% (per passenger) of the energy that is used by cars. Both figures can be improved substantially, but the easy targeting is different.

For low capacity methods like automobiles, you need to eliminate tare weight. That is why the scooters do so much better than autos. They have much less tare weight. There is a lot that can be done in this area.

For high capacity methods like transit, you need to improve load factor (reducing tare is good, but load factor is easier). The figures that you show look like the 2005 US numbers. Load factors have increased dramatically, so transit is probably doing better now. Carrying more passengers increases the energy cost by only a tiny amount. There is still a lot that can be done here.

Then, defeat the imbecile politicians and the transit union power. A mixed mode solution will almost always be best. You use a mix of heavy and light rail on the high density links, with personal vehicles for low density. If done right, this can make a huge difference. It does involve the mentally difficult task of accepting that there is no one true god. There will be a mix of choices made.

I would suggest pruning or re-organizing your lists to compare only genuinely competitive modes. Tricycles do not compete with jet aircraft, nor does heavy rail compete with city buses. Also, it is usually necessary to incorporate local terrain and weather issues. The transportation analysis for the northeast corridor is different than the analysis for Texas.

The analysis gets more complex if you consider traffic pattern modification. Work from home is one example of a substantial traffic pattern modification that can happen quickly. Relocation of housing, offices, and commerce happen more slowly. Traffic mix management happens as well. The oldest major traffic mix management project is the Alameda RR Corridor (which restructured automobile, truck, ship, and rail traffic for Long Beach). One that is just getting underway is the CREAT project around Chicago. These shift freight off trucks and onto rail. Rail is roughly 10x lower energy cost per mile for freight. Steel wheels on steel rails are incredibly efficient, but they have a very low route flexibility and a very high switching cost. These projects also re-organize transit and auto traffic to reduce the freight/passenger conflicts. It might not make much of an energy difference, but everyone involved is less upset by congestion.

The evolution of commerce also introduces changes. Mail and Internet ordering with home delivery is much more energy efficient than shopping trips. So there will be a transition toward this for non-perishable generic items. It will be much harder to manage for perishables and for items that require in person inspection or fitting. Complicating this some are the efficiencies from bulk purchase stores. Home delivery behaves much like transit. It has a high fixed initial cost, but very low per destination costs. If I can get a delivery route with an average of 100m between drop sites and fill the delivery truck, it's nearly impossible for any personal vehicle to match the delivery energy cost.

"Unfortuantely, since transit is only 3% of total transportation energy use,"
What's the other 97%?

Also, have you got any figures on Caltrain? I don't ride the light rails much, but I Caltrain quite a bit.

I'm trying to piece these bits from the essay together:
"...it is always the green move for any individual to take existing mass transit over a car."
"My first conclusion is that we would get more efficient by pushing small, fuel efficient vehicles instead of pushing transit, and at a lower cost."
"This issue is complex because we like transit for other reasons."
Because of the wheelchairs, children, and elderly, transit is still needed (at least until the "robocars" appear). If we agree that we still need transit, then what is family of 4 with no car (like mine) to do? Should we buy an electric car or continue to use transit? As you allude to in the article, one piece of the answer is in the incremental BTUs/passenger mile for the transportation options you've listed. The bar chart only shows the overall BTUs/mile though. Do you have a chart showing incremental BTUs/mile with some set of assumptions? It sounds like you've done a lot of research; I'd guess if you don't have such a chart already, you have nearly enough information to create one. Please do post it! Thanks.

This is like the airline paradox they teach kids in stats class. Airline A has a higher ontime ratio than airline B. But they both serve the same routes, and B is on time more often for every single route. How can this be? Some of the routes tend to cause more delays, and Airline B flies those routes more often.

The forms of transit you're flagging as inefficient are used in places where cars might be stuck idling in traffic jams or looping around the block looking for parking. OTOH, intercity buses and trains seem to be more efficient than highway driving. (God knows every intercity bus I've ever been stuck taking was packed to the gills)..

Also--mass transit enables greater densities, as we don't have to use so much space for parking or roads. And that's where the real savings lies--not in per mile efficiency, but in decreasing the number of miles by allowing people to live much closer to where they work. If you eliminated mass transit, many cities would become simply unworkable, and homes and businesses would have to relocate to distant suburbs.

All that said, yeah, your chart does suggest that jitneys and other systems that allow people to share vehicles but maintain flexibility are a really good idea. And some individual mass transit systems look pretty dang suspect (I love Pittsburgh, but it wouldn't be the first time it screwed up its infrastructure...).

But I think there's pretty good reason to suspect mass transit saves more energy than efficiency per mile would suggest.

Per passenger-mile? The real way to look at transportation costs is to use multiple variables. If you want to grind on some particular point, then you choose the variable that fits your agenda- the most common theme in U.S. energy discussions today. In other words, you aren't even wrong.

First, develop a procedure for individual states - then scale up to national scale. It is also worth noting that most consumed goods are now imported into the United States, and material transport doesn't even fit into the "passenger-mile" image - even though transport of goods (food, material, goods) around the United States accounts for the majority of the fossil fuel use.

Indeed, why not rework this into "fossil fuel emissions per passenger mile"? How do you decide to do the accounting? The point here is that this is just another example of bad use of statistics, period. You can draw no meaningful conclusions from the presented data.

In other countries things are different... or perhaps the writers are just lying (I mean "using statistics") in a different way?

http://www.theage.com.au/national/save-the-planet-make-a-vline-for-the-train-20080616-2ro7.html?skin=text-only

ANALYSIS of emissions from Australia's most popular motor vehicles and from public transport has shown the Hummer to be the most polluting, closely followed by the popular Ford Territory.

The research, by the Public Transport Users Association based on the Federal Government's Green Vehicle Guide, showed that diesel trains, such as those run by V/Line, were the least polluting form of transport per person per kilometre.

These trains emitted eight grams of carbon dioxide equivalents per person per kilometre, compared with 270 grams from a Hummer and 245 grams from a Ford Territory.

...

Comments: VLine is the medium-range train system in Victoria. Most Australian short-range heavy rail is electrified and in Victoria that means brown coal for fuel. Ditto for light rail. So diesel trains are used for interstate and intercity transit rather than intracity (although in NSW the electric system covers journeys within about 120km of Sydney CBD). Buses are mostly diesel here, although gas is increasingly popular. That's gas as the rest of the world uses the term... what do merkins call hydrocarbons that are gaseous at room temperature that are used for fuel?

While I don’t doubt the accuracy of your numbers, the issue is the myth or efficiency of public transport is largely dependent on ridership. As you've stated, fully loaded, the public transit system is very efficient. Asia’s and Europe’s systems are very efficient due to the ridership – ever been to China and Japan?

So really, the problem isn’t the transit systems but the people who refuse to use them. The efficiency calculation is largely cost of system/rider miles where the larger the number of riders, the greater the system efficiency.

It seems as though the essay’s ulterior motive is to trash the transit system and promote the idea of robocars.

In the spirit of the essay, i.e. discussing the data, I think if a poster wants to call Americans to greater use of transit, or even dog them for their low usage rates, then that person should supply some numbers. I would suggest that they declare an assumption of their 'ideal' ridership numbers, and then run the numbers to post btu/person/mile numbers for buses etc. that can be compared to the essayist original post. He's done a fair amount of work putting together data, lets add to it and not detract.
Maybe I should get busy on the data myself, because I refuse to be led by the nose by a culture that insists that it already knows whats best, that I should take the bus, but is not willing to put up the hard numbers to prove that this is indeed the case. If I'm asked to sacrifice my convenience, I deserve to know for sure that it is worth it. Show me the wattage!

Its your essay, you can define the purpose however you like, and I'll go along.
And well put about the efficiency of my own choice.
But my point still stands regarding the data required for my city to make the best overall choice for future planning. I've lived in 4 major cities, and Austin is the worst in relation to the convenience of transit. In any case, if I'm given a chance to vote on transit proposals, I want to decide based on something like your efficiency framework, not of a vague and pushy notion that buses are always better.
If we don't have numbers like btu/person/mile, or total cost, or grams_C02/marginal_$_GPD, or some such overarching metric, whats to prevent us from continuing to bark up the wrong tree in our pursuit to make the world a better place. Sometimes I feel like the only voter around who wants a full analysis. Thanks for bringing the DOE data to my attention.

So what type of metric would best help you evaluate if a transit plan in your area makes sense? What value should the threshold be set at? What scope (e.g. geographic area, governance zone, tax base) is most appropriate?

Did you include long distance electricity transmission loss in your plugin electric energy use numbers?

http://www.worldofenergy.com.au/graphics/photos/factsheet2/Elect-Sup-Effic.gif

Studying charts like: http://www.grinningplanet.com/2005/07-12/heinberg-4-450.jpg, impacted my transportation choice(s).

The US Transportation Energy Data Book 2004 has these figures:

Transport mode Efficiency per passenger
-------------------------------------------------------
Rail (Commuter) 5.3 L/100 km (45 MPG)
Rail (Transit Light & Heavy) 5.6 L/100 km (42 MPG)
Rail (Intercity “Amtrak”) 5.6 L/100 km (42 MPG)
Cars 7.2 L/100 km (33 MPG)
Air 8.1 L/100 km (29 MPG)
Buses (Transit) 8.8 L/100 km (27 MPG)
Personal Trucks 8.9 L/100 km (27 MPG)

We have developed a mass-transit system that is really green. An inner-city UniBus can transport 50 passengers with a fuel efficiency of 100 MPG! It is even better if we supplement energy with solar-assist.

You can see more information on our web site:
http://www.alternatetransport.com

Calvin

Interesting article, but I'd be curious to see where the figures for average passenger load for rail transit come from. In my experience, 33 passengers per train would be a good bit lower than average on the late-night weekend trains that I frequently ride here in Philadelphia, and those are noticably desolate compared to similar trains in other cities that I'm familiar with. Trains at any other time would of course cary many times more, of course, which makes it hard for me to accept your figures at face value unless there is some other factor that's slipping my mind....

Nice presentation, and very interesting figures.

A thought: rather than present performance based on the average passenger, could you show the different transportation modes in terms of the BTUs/passenger-mile for the marginal passenger (additional BTUs required per additional passenger mile)? I'm guessing that the public transit options will come in close to zero on this basis. This is the real answer to the question "What should I do as an individual to be green" though of course it doesn't answer the question of what we should do on a systemic basis.

I have used public transit a lot in the DC area, and the DC metro carries over a million people per workday. Making a simple calculation of BTUs per car vs. metro train is not helpful, because it does not factor in the dramatic increase in BTUs (due to traffic gridlock) that would take place if those million+ riders switched to cars every day. It takes a hell of a lot more BTUs to get from DC to the suburbs in stop-and-go traffic than in free-flowing traffic conditions, but free-flowing traffic conditions -- already rare -- would be nonexistent if those million+ riders switched to cars.
As more people switch from cars to public transit, if traffic goes down as a result, then it lowers the btu/mile number for the remaining car commuters who are traveling in less traffic.

yeah but the trains run on clean green coal, nuke or hydro...bring it on!

Thank you for posting the numbers. Too much writing about transit is based on fantasy rather than fact. A good example is the proposed high speed rail for California. The planners promise a system which will be profitable and they promise to deliver same for a fraction of what it will really cost --- despite the fact that no public transit system in the world operates without substantial, ongoing government subsidies.

The only truly, inherently efficient mass transit system is a variation on the old electric trolley system. The trolleys trundle down the street from corner to corner, dropping off and picking up according to a set schedule, and trolleys are added or removed from the lines according to the time of day. When you exit the system you should never be more than 1 city block from your destination and it should never take more than ~15 minutes to cross from one side of the system to the other - there probably must be express trolleys incorporated into the design. The electricity comes from clean electric generators, solar or nuclear, and regenerative braking returns power to the system at each stop. Net efficiency would be at least 50% better than ICE vehicles and these would create negligible pollution.

The only reason most cities don't have these is that in the 1940s and 1950s the Big Three automakers bribed - er., convinced the cities to install bus lines that were noisy, polluting, and had horrible schedules. Then when riders got angry at the cities they sold them cars.

Someone mentioned the deleterious effect of mass transit on regular traffic. I presume there is also a benefit, but it it's hard to quantify.

More importantly, when calculating carbon costs of any transit system, don't we need to include the carbon footprint of all the drivers/engineers/brakemen/ticket-takers? They are taking their (well deserved) salaries and using it to consume lots of energy as well--for their own cooling/heating/transportation/entertainment/manufacturing.

In other words, they could have different jobs in which they produced value for their carbon emissions. They do not hove those jobs, so that value-per-tonne-carbon has been lost as a society.

"This issue is complex because we like transit for other reasons."

It is also complex because there are reasons to not like it for other reasons. Actually, not like it is perhaps an overstatement. More like it will never be feasible in some settings. In rural areas your major premise that transit fails because ridership is never close to 100% will always be the case. Not because rural people are not green but because I suspect that below a certain population density you come to a point that you take the mass out of mass transit.

I have lived in Hong Kong two years, and the Philippines four.
You have not taken into account population density. The MTR
(Mass Transit Rail) in HK is the ONLY unsubsidized (in fact,
VERY profitable, and run by a private company) mass transit
in the world. This is due primarily to the fact that HK has a
population density of 14,000 people/sq mile (the highest on
earth). Most of Asia averages 300-700 people/sq mile, much
higher in urban areas. The US averages 30-70 people/sq mile,
almost nowhere (even downtown Manhatten) high enough to make
Mass Transit even break even, let alone profitable. This is
why it works in Asia (where they still prefer individual means
of transport, such as scooters, over MT). The MT in Atlanta
(Moving AXXXXXXs Rapidly Through Atlanta) is a total (and
typical) joke from a financial viewpoint. It can never be anywhere
near profitable, or even usable to most of the city's 5M plus
inhabitants, although we ALL have to subsidize it. When it comes
into a suburban area, crime rates soar and property values
plummet. We fight it tooth and nail, yet we are forced to
support it. For a long time, a former welfare brood mare with
NO prior business experience was running it (she had a budget
of about US$1B a year, and produced essentially no benefits).

There are some other factors that I think need to be considered when attempting to deterine the overall energy efficiency of mass transit. The first is that mass transit routes are necessarily what may be called average routes: they are not the most direct route for most of the passengers. In other words, some fraction of the users of mass transit have to travel more miles to get from point A to point B than they would if they used their personal vehicles. The other factor is that mass transit operates on its own schedule and users of mass transit have to adjust their schedules to that of the transit system. This means that you have "wait for the bus" and while you're waiting you're not really working or producing anything. If you have to transfer from one mass transit system to another (train to subway, bus route to bus route) more time is spent waiting. Both of these factors involve small amounts per instance and tremendously large numbers of instances. It is the same sort of thing with allowing "right turn on red" which saves maybe ten seconds or so per person in idling time but a very large amount of time (and fuel) in total.

I am awfully glad you did this research and wrote this article. I, for one, have no intention of ever using mass transit, except for air travel. The reason for has nothing to do with "green" or btu per passenger mile. When I was in high school in Detroit in the mid 1970's, I rode a city bus, not a school bus, to school. I observed first hand then that the majority of users of mass transit were people with no respect for others and obviously with no morality. I was robbed at knife and gunpoint enough times to cause me to A)Start illegally carrying a concealed weapon, and B)Quit school to avoid getting on the bus. This many years later I have not forgotten those lessons and I now have a license to carry concealed and my own motor vehicle. I know for certain that I face a much lower risk of violent confrontation in my vehicle than I would on mass transit and that if I do encounter a criminal, the chance for turning the criminal into the "victim" has expanded exponentially. I also now reside in Florida, whose new laws make it quite legal for me to shoot the perpetrator son of a bitch in the head. So... I will take my SUV to the dance and screw green!

Thank you for the posting Brad. Not surprise about your findings but still think we are comparing apples to bananas. The obsessions to compare transit to autos is getting old and in practical terms is of little consequence. I am with you 100% on the robo-cars. I personally believe the future of transportation will be something like an ipod-car that is called on demand. This will be the typical public transit but it will never come to reality if we keep on insisting that public transit in US cities should look like those in European cities.
I don't believe in density. In fact the best green technology is the internet and over time there will be more and more people working remotely using the internet and computers. Both passenger travel and freight transportation will be changed due to technology and (if we could only open our brains to the future of technology) transportation corridors will be much different than what we envision them now.
Regardless, good thoughts on your research. Reminds me that public transit such as buses use up over 50% of the pavement's life. Thus in your calculations you should attribute more than 50% of cost of pavement to buses and heavy vehicles, maybe 80 to 90%. Then you can incorporate the cost of pavement and related to per vehicle trip and extrapolate that to per mile of rider.
One factor that is never addressed in this type of comparisons is the factor of convenience. The reason why people driver cars is because it is much more convenient and if we equate convenience to dollar value the people use cars because using transit is too expensive; in most cases it is impossible to do with transit what we do with car, i.e. go where we want to go, whenever we want to.

Brad, superb article. Since moving to a larger metropolitan area (coincidentally San Jose) and having to deal with the higher gas prices, I recently opted for an alternative to driving everyday that I find works EXTREMELY well, the Electric Bicycle (http://www.electric-bikes.com/bikes/electrec.html). Based upon my commute distance, gas mileage, cost of the bike, cost of recharging it, etc; I figured I'd break even in about a year (assuming a modest 50% usage).

From Randal O'Toole CATO Institute

http://americandreamcoalition.org/ADCFS2.pdf
‘Rails won’t Save America’ 6 pages

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9325
Does Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

When looking at 'green'ness, it's vital to note that California (for instance) gets something close to 80% of its electricity from renewables (mostly hydro), while Texas gets something more like 20% of its electricity from renewables.

This means that an electric train is *MUCH* greener in California than in Texas. A huge, huge difference. Apples to bananas.

This is going to make cities like San Jose look much better on a greenhouse gas basis. And in fact this difference outweighs pretty much every other number.

Anyway, those extremely low average passenger numbers simply make it clear that running an unpopular and inefficient 'mass' transit system is stupid. Mass transit is for where there's a large *mass* to transport. If the roads aren't congested, you don't need or want mass transit, from an efficiency and emissions point of view. And if the roads are congested, buses and streetcars will be very slow, and therefore unpopular and inefficient, unless they have their own right-of-ways. This leads to the conclusion that the main point of such a system, from an efficiency point of view, is to speed commuters past congested areas. Most US bus systems have zero dedicated right-of-way, and are therefore close to entirely wasted.

The Pittsburgh "LRT" is actually a piecemeal conversion of a very old set of streetcar lines. There is no doubt that it's better than shutting down the streetcar lines and driving every single streetcar user into buses or cars, since that would add a very nasty amount of congestion to Pittsburgh streets; however, the line is not on a particularly rational route for a 'core rail' line (it exists largely because of streetcar tunnels which made bus conversion difficult during the 'transit holocaust'). In other words, it *goes the wrong places*. Pittsburgh's transit agency is currently attempting to extend it so it actually connects to more than one place people want to go.

Incidentally, it's sad to see lunatics claiming that mass transit increases crime and reduces property values; this has been proven untrue a gazillion times.

If you're curious, the energy costs of maintenance and construction of asphalt roadway are generally higher per mile than those of steel railways, largely due to how fast asphalt wears out and the fact that it's basically pure oil. Although it varies depending on any number of things such as the use of concrete rail ties (much more energy-intensive than wood), different maintenance standards (a road allowed to go to pot will be more energy-efficient in construction and maintenance than a railway inspected every week, though it might well make up for it in efficiency of the vehicles using it), the steel production method for rails (recycled obviously better), whether the asphalt is hot-rolled or not, etc.

For another minor point, the degree to which rail vehicles have lost energy-efficiency over the period when cars have gained energy-efficiency is largely a US phenomenon owing to very poor regulatory choices. The Federal Railroad Administration really likes tank-like vehicles; the trend in the rest of the world is lighter, lighter, lighter.

There are lots of issues with this analysis. First of which is saying that all cars carry 1.5 people. Hahahaha. Come on, it's more like 1.15 people per car if that. The DOE is on crack if it thinks 1.5 is normal. How many people do you know that carpool to work or drive with other people that much. That is 3 people riding in every two cars. Next time you're on the freeway look around and see how much that happens. I also find it hard to believe that trolley buses are higher energy use than diesels.

Second, is comparing cars to transit without talking more about land use even realistic if we're going to talk about being green? Cars have created a land use pattern that results in a lot of wasted energy. New Yorkers use 1/3rd of the energy that the rest of America uses. This is because of the land use patterns from the transit network there, not just the transit itself versus cars.

Using transit also means that you're not going to drive as much because you probably live in a more walkable/bikable environment. In Portland, Metro did a study in 1994 that showed compact development and good transit would push a use of 9 vehicle miles per day. In exurban Portland that number increased to 21 vehicles miles today. So even if we let your 1.5 number in cars stand, that still creates a situation where people are driving 12 more miles per day per capita. So lets be honest about what being green means in terms of transportation and not forget all the connections that occur. Looking at cars versus transit in energy alone is short sighted and misses a lot of issues that come with auto-centricity that seems like an illness in this country and is a huge WASTE of energy.

Then there is the issue of using BTU between all modes, specifically electric ones.

http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_lrt_2007-08a.htm

I'm not a brilliant person, but I do know that government oversite comes at a price: less money or less freedom. I live 20 miles from a city. I prefer to be right where I am. Mass transit is not "friendly" out here. It takes a lot of time to ride the bus when it stops every few miles. I've been trying to keep up on solutions to the oil crisis. John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell (on Glenn Beck last week) said gas is only 20% efficient and ethanol is less. He proposes hydrogen cars. They're clean energy, emitting only water and some heat. But, he failed to mention that hydrogen is produced by coal, gas or oil, so we're back to square one. Electric cars, hmmm, they're okay tooling around town, but they don't go far before they need to be charged again. Hybrids are a possibility, the prototypes can get over 100 miles per gallon when you calculate the cost of electricity, but I don't want to "plug in" my car. I don't want battery powered cars ruining my environment. Plus, they are painfully expensive. I just want a gas powered car that can get 100 miles to the gallon. If we could do that, we would reduce our CO2's by at least half. Is that asking too much? (A rhetorical question.) There's an international competition to build a 100-mile-per-gallon car. The Automotive X Prize will have an award of at least $10 million to the team that builds the car. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that somewhere someone has the ingenuity and brilliance to create a car that is capable of rocking our world!

So, until that happens, government will want us to do our part to make sacrifices and spend hours on a train or bus, move closer to a city, limit our vacations to the closest beach, and pony up more for the cost of fuel. No more going to visit grandma down in Florida (a 1,500 mile trip). Maybe we should just start riding horses.

Medical injury costs and value-of-life paments make bicycles and scooters non-starters:
Bicycles are about 180 times as dangerous as cars:

Per 100 million miles traveled automobiles incur 1.41 fatalities and bicycles 250. [http://www.helmets.org/cdcstats.htm and http://www.fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx }Farming -- all that extra food the cyclist needs -- has one of the highest fatality rates of all occupations.

Injured and dead folks inur large medical costs and loose work time.
The average roadway fatality costs about $980K. Average non-fatal bicycle accident costs $220K to one million dollars.[http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/almanac-safety.htm]

Also Most deaths on major roads. Fifty-seven percent of bicycle deaths in 1999 occurred on major roads, and 37 percent occurred on local roads. (6) The yearly economic costs also include $61 billion in lost workplace productivity; $20.2 billion in lost household productivity; $59 billion in property damage; $32.6 billion in medical costs; and $25.6 billion in travel delay costs.(source = ? Insurance institute link broken)

I am not surprised at your blog as I as I have previously made similar calculations.

Further, I recommend that every educated mass-transit fan read their local transit authority annual report -- it's an eye opener. Then they should visit the large, classy transit administration building.

Green doesn't mean energy efficient. If you're concerned about climate change, it means carbon efficient. If you're concerned about peak oil, it means fossil fuel efficient.
You're using a metric that's meaningless.

I'd like to see your chart redrawn to take into account carbon efficiency, not energy efficiency, because, as some other commenters have mentioned, the greenhouse gas emissions of an electric vehicle, such as a train or trolley bus, depend upon how the electricity is produced.

I'm living in a city with electric rail and electric trolley buses. 70% of the power comes from hydro, geothermal and wind. So for this city, public transport starts looking like a low-carbon way of helping people move around. Even in the US, 30% of electricity generation isn't fossil fuel.

The fact is that we all demand an awful lot of mobility. We want to live far from our jobs; we want the freedom to roam quickly and freely over a vast physical area during the course of our days and weeks; we don't want to walk any further than absolutely necessary, which means parking very close to our destination at all times.
Walking is an amazingly simple and efficient way to get from one place to another -- and it doesn't take as long as you'd think.

I've used these types of data sets quite a bit for environmental research, and can tell you from a quick look that there is something very wrong with your numbers.

There are many pitfalls in interpreting these numbers. In addition, the numbers don't always give the full picture. E.g., there are huge differences in the environmental impacts of electric and gasoline energy.

Before you publish, even on the internet, you might want to validate your findings with somebody who knows what they are doing. In fact, many such studies are available for you to compare, and they show pretty different results.

Another big caveat on these numbers is that they were probably measured at different vehicle speeds, and in some cases that has an apples-and-oranges effect. The numbers *presumably* reflect average speeds for each vehicle, and we all know from our experience that a bicycle or scooter won't take us someplace as fast as a car on a freeway; so on the one hand it's perfectly legitimate to present them like this. However, we do need to keep speed in mind when making general statements that one form of transit is more efficient than the other. Here are some thoughts how speed affects these numbers (in no particular order):
* All the cars and buses and motorcycles are probably measured at 55 or 65 MPH; local trains probably less; electric scooters and bicycles certainly were measured at much lower speeds. At 65 MPH, most of the car or motorcycle motor's energy is expended overcoming aerodynamic drag; so they were going at the same speed as the scooters, they would look much better.
* Cars and scooters and bikes and buses all have rubber tires which have significant rolling resistance. There's a huge difference in resistance between racing-style bikes and ordinary ones; I wonder if DOE averaged the mix of bicycles actually in use well at all.
* Rolling resistance may predominate over aerodynamic drag at low speeds; without knowing the measurement speed it's not clear which factor is responsible for a difference.
* At a high enough speed for aerodynamic drag to predominate, a car does far worse than scooters or motorcycles or bicycles simply because its frontal area is much greater. Excellent streamlining can give a factor of 5 or more (Ca=.2 or less) better than a box with the same frontal area. Skin effect drag dependent on vehicle length is 100x less I think.
* Aerodynamics (plus friction in the motor and gears -- I know nothing about that) predominates for trains at much lower speeds, because rail rolling resistance is trivial compared with pneumatic tires. A long train amortizes frontal-area drag over many cars; assuming gaps between cars are filled well, the actual energy difference between pulling one or two or six cars is probably much less than you'd think; conductor pay and crime risks for a mostly-empty train are probably more significant cost factors.