https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
that table is thoroughly fascinating. i mean all of them, there’s more than one table on that article
apparently walking is the most energy-efficient transport mode of all?!?!? apart from bicycles
what i find mind-blowing is that airplanes consume approximately the same amount of energy as cars and trains. I mean i can easily see cars and trains being on the same level, but i always thought that airplanes consumed like an order of magnitude more fuel than cars. considering how everybody keeps saying that “airplanes consume so much fuel” and such. crazy.
and also boats are less efficient than i thought? boats consume 16 L/100 km while cars, trains and airplanes consume 6 L/100 km?
This table is heavily biased against transit. First of all it is based on data from places that have by far and large underinvested inefficient underused transit in cities built for cars and not for transit. Secondly MJ/passenger/ distance is itself heavily biased against transit. Distance travelled is of no value in itself. Getting to places of interest is of value. Transit journies are on aversge shorter because transit oriented corridors allow for more compact urban layouts. Having to drive twice as far because cars need so much space, adds no value to going to the super market.
This is misleading.
Airplanes are worse not because of energy consumption per person, but because of carbon equivalent units are magnitudes higher when nitrogen oxides are burned at a high altitude.
Also average load of the bus being only ~8 people? Like yeah that seems about right when I’ve ridden the shitty bus before but that’s a number that can really be improved upon
That’s high for my area. 3-4 is probably closer to average
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Why are those passenger numbers for the train so low? Here at least the railway moves something like 2000 passengers per vehicle on average. Over 3000 at peak times.
For modes using electricity, losses during generation and distribution are included.
They should do this for the fossil fuel modes as well and see what that does to the numbers!
Yeah for the diesel/petrol/gasoline ones they’ve excluded energy wastage at the extraction point (eg if they have a flare), moving the oil to the oil refinery (from wherever in the world it came from), during the refining process (definitely a lot of energy used there), transporting the end product to wherever the filling station is, and finally pumping it into the vehicle.
But they included all the comparable costs for electricity. They wanted fossil fuels to look as good as possible. I’m extremely skeptical about data that suggests air travel is efficient when people have been talking for years about how wasteful and environmentally damaging it is.
For long travel, like intercontinental level distances, it probably is pretty efficient with a full plane. I’ve always understood that the waste and environmental damages are more from a combination of the use of private planes, and short routes that really ought to be train trips with the infrastructure to make them a preferable option to flying.
For example, if I suddenly found out that I needed to get from NYC to Boston by midnight tonight, without using a car, it should be a no-brainer to take Amtrak up there. Yet, even with fuel costs for airlines being quite high right now, there are exactly 4 trains leaving Penn Station for Boston that are cheaper than just catching a flight from JFK, and in the best of cases, they take about 4 times as long to cover that distance. It should really be significantly cheaper than flying in order to deter the majority, if not all of those people who do not expressly need to make that trip in just over an hour, for whatever reason, from taking those sorts of flights. Cheap enough that flying simply isn’t price competitive, and that people don’t mind the extra travel time.
They should also add the cost of harm done to the environment. Then it would be close to infinitely.
Is that generation and distribution within the vehicle or in the grid?
Distribution throughout the vehicle would be laughibly trivial, and calling using batteries ‘generation’ is weird, but they are still like 99% efficient.
Probably means the efficiency loss burning gas (in power plants much more efficient than cars) is counted for electric vehicles, but ignored for gas vehicles through some crazy mental gymnastics.
Its also a US study published in 2018, so this is an expected bias.
Buses seem to be shafted in that comparison by the fact that no one uses them in the US. Where I am, a bus gets just seven passengers only in the middle of the night. At other times, buses would be easily at the top of the table if not for the fact that our trains also move more than twenty people per car.
That’s because mass transit is, with very few exceptions, absolutely ass in the USA. People only use it as the absolute last resort. That skews the table a lot against any public transit.
Easy problem to solve.
Increase the cost of gas to $100 per liter for consumers (exceptions for food delivery, etc) and use the surplus income to build better busses.
Boom. Everyone has excellent public transportation. And everyone uses it.
Your assumption that busses exist so they can be improved is quite telling. Huge swaths of the population, even living in million inhabitants+ cities, simply are not served by any form of mass transit.
The reason public transit works so well in Germany (where I did live for a bit) and Holland (visited and read about) is not because taking a car is more expensive. It’s because mass transit works well, it’s there when you need it, gets you to your destination in reasonable time and comfort, and is easy to use.
The very urban fabric in the USA is car oriented. Every little bodega has to have a dozen parking spaces built by law. Supermarkets have 3 to 4 times their store area wasted in parking lots. Everything is far apart because of this, so walking is impractical. With everyone driving to places, you need wide, fast roads, which makes biking places very unsafe. Every once in a while I see a white painted bike attached to a memorial in a light post, commemorating a life lost. And I live in the suburbs.
It’s not an insurmountable problem, the Netherlands did that in the 70s. But any solution that proposes a simple fix is doomed to failure. This has to be a concerted, intense effort to work.
My approach would be to jack up vehicle registration fees. Simply doubling the vehicle registration cost every year over about 5 years would make individual car ownership expensive enough that people will really try to avoid it.
By the fifth year you’re looking at about $5k per year just to legally own and operate a car on public roads, which is workable (most people pay more than that per year for their car loans) but it’s more than enough to make any family think twice about owning more than one car, and more than enough to make not owning a car and just renting/taking public transit a super attractive option. Plus it’s more than the cost of a mid-range e-bike so trading your car for an ebike becomes extremely cost effective with a break-even point measured in just months
5 years is also enough time to get roads reconfigured for the new traffic flow of mostly ebikes, get more buses in the roads and start planning/building out new train routes. There’s an incredible rail network still in the US and just putting out more passenger services on the existing tracks that are presently freight-exclusive would make a massive difference
Two stroke engines in lawn care motors produce worse pollution than cars.
We need to increase the cost of gas. It’s not just cars.
That always sounded to me like a chicken-egg problem. People don’t use buses and subways, because buses and subways are populated by weird dirty hobos. Well guess what…
That’s wrong on so many levels I can’t even begin to unpack it.
Oh suuuure. Except maybe you haven’t noticed, but I can read English, and peruse US-dominated social media. In the threads on mass transit it’s always “truly these are complex and multifaceted problems”, and then outside that thread it’s “I had to use subway today with all the masturbating weirdos like a peasant”.
They are just not related. The crazies on the street are not disappearing if people all decide to use transit. How is that a chicken and egg problem?
Explain then how it is that there are no dirty smelly masturbating crazies on buses and subways in my country.
Crazies hang out doing crazy stuff in spaces that are conducive to such behavior. If normal people ride public transport because it’s expected that public transport accommodates normal people, then crazy behavior isn’t tolerated on public transport.
does your country have any social safety nets?
Maybe it’s the same for commuter rail. It’s weird seeing average 33 passengers, when they were always standing room only while I was riding
Yeah, I’ve lumped them together in my mind, because subway is typically not called ‘train’ in my language. But the situation is about the same. Just looked it up: a subway car here has the ‘full capacity’ of over 300 people, commuter cars around the same, but probably less in practice. And the numbers sure push toward that during rush hour.
I don’t even get the first train line if another is amtrak and another is commuter. is commuter like the chicago metra maybe then light/heavy is a metro?
So the problem is the term “light rail” and “heavy rail” are really technically meaningless. Historically they referred to how physically heavy the actual rails the trains ran on were because freight railroads used a much heavier rail for their mainlines while interurban transit services used cheaper lighter rails because they almost exclusively ran what would now be called an “electric multiple unit” with 1-3 car trains, thereby not requiring more heavy duty rails
Nowadays the actual rail is far from the largest cost and the operational simplicity of using the exact same grade and standards of rail as the freight railroads means they can move their equipment on the freight railroads’ tracks and freight can be moved on their tracks as needed. Because this shift happened to occur during the period of railroad disinvestment in the US nobody really bothered to update the nomenclature so now that we’re reinvesting in rail it completely makes no sense at all
Personally I like to use the terms “interurban” for frequent local services with equipment tuned for commuters that runs between cities (and I mean “cities” from a functional definition not a legal one. Just because Shuamberg is legally a separate city doesn’t mean it isn’t functionally part of Chicago. There really aren’t any remaining interurban services that fit this definition in the US anymore) “commuter rail” for passenger rail service within a sprawling metropolitan area and runs equipment tuned for commuters, “regional rail” for passenger service that goes further than a simple commute or a quick run to the store/museum, has equipment tuned for passengers spending more than an hour on the train. And “long distance rail” for passenger services that are tuned for travel of greater than 300 miles. To me “metro” refers to a grade separated urban rail transit system (so like Chicago’s L or the New York Subway) and “tram/trolley” refers to a ground level urban rail transit system functions like a higher capacity bus, potentially intermixing with car traffic
But this just demonstrates the problem which is that the US has so disinvested in rail transport that there’s no clear, consistent definitions in use anymore so people have to define what they’re talking about every dang time!
yeah see your definitions fit with what I have in my head. the metro compared to tram/trolley which I really just thing of as a bus on rails although I did not really have a good name for the greater city area but I guess commuter makes sense. when it comes to farther I start thinking it like shipping or airtravel when it comes to those long distances. since they are not an everyday or even everyyear type thing I just don’t think of them enough to have a real term for them. Oh man though I went to school downstate and was using a bus system and either they didn’t have any spots left or the place to get it was closed so I picked up an amtrack train and after that it was my first and prefered method to get back and forth from school even though it was a bit pricier. More comfortable and larger seats. Can actually get up and move around. Bathrooms you are not scared to use and a car selling stuff like gas station fare but it had tables which was nice.
I recently took my first Amtrak train (which is funny because I’ve been to countless railroad museums, I’ve been collecting model trains for most of my life, I’ve freaking driven a train, but you know the one thing I didn’t do before this month? Ride Amtrak.
Honestly it was a super wonderful experience that I absolutely want to do again. Even sleeping in the coach seat was way better than I’d expected! And $80 to go halfway across the country is hard to beat!
Maybe, but I’m not familiar with chicagos system
- Amtrak == intercity. Travel from one city to another, potentially long distance. Scheduled
- Commuter Rail == into and out of the city, over a large region. Typically Bring commuting workers in from suburbs and may be scheduled to prioritize rush hour
- heavy rail == “normal” trains, might be used as subway or surface. Typically travel from one part of a city to another, and operate continuously, with minutes between trains
- light rail == slower, cheaper, a tram. might be underground or a streetcar. Typically travel along neighborhoods, more local transit. Scheduled continuously with minutes between trains
Here in Boston
- I can take Amtrak to nyc, to Portland Maine, or to Albany and west
- we have commuter rail lines covering half the state to bring people from towns and suburbs into Boston.
- we have I think 3 “heavy” rail lines operating as subways, and on the surface as it leaves the city proper
- we have a light rail line operating in tunnels through the city center but on the surface as a tram or streetcar through various neighborhoods. For example students can hop on the get from one end of Boston university another
I think “metros” are a combination of “heavy rail” and “commuter rail” over a larger metro area. Fast and longer distance like commuter rail, but regular service like “heavy rail”
ok yeah then it makes sense. over here you have metra which runs on the same cargo rail as amtrak just more geared around commuting and then we have a metro line so that is like heavy. I think we had light tram type things at times but as far as I know don’t have any currently.
Urban sprawl, zoning laws, lack of dedicated bus lanes with safe and walkable stops, low frequency, comfort (seat, space, aircon/heat, chargers), and prices.
Comfort and frequency are the easiest to solve, prices, urban sprawl, zoning laws, and the like less so. Not to mention that labour rights must be improved for bus drivers.
Also the data seems to be from 2018. More than 50% of all new purchased city passenger buses in Europe are zero emission (usually electrified). And that number is higher in some other countries, with China being ahead of everyone.
yeah where I am at busses are pacted at rush hour and half full at least throughout the day with a long span around lunch being full again. It also has different size busses for various routes and time based on their metrics. Even has bus trackers so you don’t leave to early from your house waiting in the cold or heat.
Sadly it’s missing bicycles and Falkor
what i find mind-blowing is that airplanes consume approximately the same amount of energy as cars
The same logic could be applied to spacecrafts. The energy efficiency of a spacecraft travelling to Mars is approximately 10-50MJ/100km - between a car and a bicycle. Should everyone take a ticket to Mars rather than driving their SUV to work?
Planes and trains are also quite close to each other and in many cases cover the same routes. However, planes run 100% on fossil fuels, trains are often electric.
…What’s keeping us from having electric planes?
Weight. As you burn down fuel, the plane gets lighter, so requires less fuel/energy for the remaining distance.
With a battery powered plane, the battery is just as heavy all the time. It also has less energy density. This means wayyy less range with current tech.
Clearly the solution is lots of little batteries, so the plane can drop them as it flies.
Into the ocean, ideally. That way we spur growth in our mining sector to replace them all with new batteries every time. The shareholders are going to love us.
This might actually work? I imagine getting up to altitude is the most difficult and energy intensive step since the engines are operating at a higher power and the air is thicker.
Even if that’s only 10% or 15% of the overall energy usage, being able to drop the battery and have it return to the airport on its own for reuse could be a cool concept. You could also optimize that particular battery for take off & climbing, and have the main battery for cruising.
It just needs to be able to pilot itself back to a landing / catching structure 😄
You made me smile, thanks
There is actually a rocket that does this (the Electron). Uses batteries to power the fuel pumps, drops them as it goes up.
Also there are planes that drop rockets. Do you think we can use them to make the environment more friendly?
Dropping them with guided parachutes doesn’t sound crazy to me.
It does to me.
“Your flight has been cancelled on account of a moderate wind in the forecast somewhere between New York and San Francisco.”
I feel something like this could be a way…
Overhaul Planes
What if we had smaller planes? You could end subsidies for plane flights under 1,000/1,500 km, as planes are less energy efficent below those distances than train. You can also abolish flights for planes that are heavier than a certain weight, and subside investing in green plane fuel research. To make the transition smooth, you’d have to do this in phases, and ensuring CEOs are on board with it without corruption.
With flying, the security and having to travel to the airport (the airport requires a lot more specialised infrastructure), a journey for 1,500 km would take at least 3 to 5 hours.
Trains
Train stations by comparison, take up much less space and thus occur more widely. Thus travel time to them is less.
Therefore, accounting for security and travel time towards the station, a train can be equally fast, and doesn’t lead to ear pain for passengers. If they don’t stray too far, scenic routes are also possible, which is beautiful. As you curve downward a valley, the Mont Blanc reveals itself to you. Driving along rolling hills, past rustic pines and beaches, floral meadows and fair lakes and cities…
They should be massively more subsided to reduce prices. Avoiding overcrowding (which decreases comfort) could be done by only allowing as many to board as there are seats available.
High speed rails could be ideal for daytime travelling. They should be frequent and between many mid-sized and large cities. That is, up until the journey would be longer than a plane flight and its preparations. With longer distances between stops, sleeper trains would be handier, especially if their comfort is seriously improved.
What would sleeper trains need?
Wifi, chargers. You could have cabins for 4 people as the standard, with:
- banks that can be turned into comfortable beds
- a foldable table
- rubbish bin
- storage space
Interior should be simple, hypoallergenic but ‘cosy’. Not claustrophobic, unclean, or metallic.
A more luxurious option might be a private shower (as well baby diaper changing spot) and toilet, with more space. Breakfast served.
A direct journey thus would be handier for sleeper trains, or at the very least the time between transfers should be at least 10 hours (8 sleep, 2 for going to sleep and waking up). There could be transfer hubs for these sleeper trains where you have lounges that are for eating breakfast/dinner, letting children play, or for focusing.
Train stations require train lines between them, that’s the crux of the issue.
There is research into electric/hydrogen planes.
Honestly pretty sure their comment is AI generated, so dont waste too much time analysing it
Technology, or rather, lack thereof. As others pointed out, planes need to bring their own energy supply and use additional energy for that. Weight is a very big factor for air transport’s energy consumption. Fossil fuels have a very high energy density, which make them great for bringing along. Once light weight battery tech (without excessively large sizes) becomes available, it should be no issue to electrify planes. Alternatively, find another source of electricity. E.g. nuclear has a much higher energy density than fossil, but obviously has it’s own issues, as do all other currently available tech options.
Weight is a very big factor for air transport’s energy consumption. Fossil fuels have a very high energy density, which make them great for bringing along.
Fossil fuels also have the benefit of being weight that’s shed (burned) as you fly, so an international flight will be much lighter when landing than it weighs when taking off. It’s like the rocket equation but much less severe due to much less energy requirement
Our World in Data has more useful figures that attempt to be comparable. In short, it very strongly contradicts that table.
yeah just looked this up. why the difference?
I didn’t expect that a train would be more efficient than biking. I guess the efficiencies of scale are hard to beat, but still.
I’m tempted to think the minimal biking infrastructure would help bikes, but infrastructure amortises nicely so probably not.
yeah idk if infrastructure is accounted for here… also maybe if youre vegetarian or something biking is more efficient
Airplane got a huge correction because emissions at high altitude is worse for the climate.
This part is a fairly new consensus, at some point air travel was even maybe beneficial for the climate due to formation of cloud cover.
Energy efficiency is not equivalent to CO2 emissions.
What’s demand response?
It’s a bonkers newish form of not-a-bus, often running passenger vans, usually operates where you either book your rides a day or two in advance or book with an app and wait 5-120 minutes for it to show up, and the service runs door to door.
They’re ultimately super inefficient in the real world requiring an extremely high driver:passenger ratio to be at all competitive with bus services
Edit to add: it’s basically the answer to “what if taxi replace bus?”
oh come off it, it’s a great way to provide service in areas that are NEVER going to get proper bus lines otherwise.
We use it in most of sweden (as a fallback in rural areas) and it’s perfectly functional.Oh yeah it makes perfect sense for very small towns and rural areas, but when a city with a population measured in the hundreds of thousands seriously tries to run a demand response transit system as literally it’s entire transit system, it deserves more than this level of derision
right, but maybe americans can try to remember that actual rural areas (as in, something between the density of suburbia and wyoming) do exist, and that the entire world doesn’t consist of 30 megacities in a desert? It’s very frustrating to see perfectly valid modes of transport dismissed as bonkers and inefficient, when it demonstrably works okay in the right circumstances and enables 90% of my country to have any sort of public transport at all.
I see this kind of thing so often from americans, taking their personal experiences with public transport and their local conditions, and projecting that upon the entire concept of public transport as a whole.
Everything from “public transport is full of stinky druggies and is only for the truly desperate”, to “the only form of public transport that exists is buses; trains and trams are ancient and irrelevant”. And it’s baffling because just looking at how things work in the rest of the world would immediately disabuse those notions.Hey man, I get the frustration, but your frustration is misplaced. I presently live in a town of ~10k people, married a woman who grew up on a goat farm outside of a town of 700, I work in an unincorporated community of around 400. I just took a big vacation in which I rode about a dozen different transit systems, and I’m already planning the next one. I’m a freaking model railroader and I’ve been looking at potential adding a running model bus system to my model railroad as well.
Trust me I get what you’re saying, I understand the exact frustrations you’ve expressed, I just ask you do the same for me
My guess is taxis and things like Uber.
Something you have to call up/book to get anywhere
I’ve always thought that a 60 passenger bus with 2 people on it is never going to be as efficient as a car with 2 people. Probably closer to 2 cars with 1 each. And that’s a strikingly common situation in North America because they won’t buy a smaller bus and electric busses are still a dangerous concept for so many transit managers.
Speed is the problem for boats
ooh interesting! Today I Learned
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boats consume 16 L/100 km
see also sailboats and economies of scale.
Yeah, the cost of a bunch of sailors eating rice and beans is far less than a diesel engine.
The bicycle vs velomobile (latter is more energy efficient in chart) is based on high speed. velomobile is heavier, and uses more energy at low speed and stop and go traffic. Parking the dam thing onto a sidewalk is an ordeal that takes energy.
It’s unclear that food energy used for exercise should count the same as fuel. Implies Wally lifestyle is bestest.
“On demand” is taxi-equivalents? Transit scores low with low occupancy busses. Air is optimized for most perfect economy, and chart likely created by that industry.
Why the hell would you park a vehicle on a sidewalk??
qualifies as a bicycle. OP’s velomobile has no power assist. It is a recumbent bicycle (tricycle usualy) with an aerodynamic shell around it.
And why the hell would you put that on a sidewalk??
Sidewalks are for pedestrians. Not bicycles!
to park it. lock up stations are on sidewalk.
That’s fucked
