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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
Clearly the solution is lots of little batteries, so the plane can drop them as it flies.
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.”
Speed is the problem for boats
ooh interesting! Today I Learned
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.
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.
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
