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Save the earth, drive your car?
Adding lots of train and bus lines to car-congested roads would seem to be an environmental slam dunk. If only the math would cooperate.
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Mass transit in the Northeast was hit hard by Sandy. New Yorkers had to do without the subway, for example, but now the transit system has mostly recovered. It’s a perfect time to be thankful for the extensive network of public transportation that exists in the city. In fact, it means that New Yorkers have one of the smallest per-capita carbon footprints in the U.S.
But you’re probably sensing a hidden side here, right?
"Mass transit can be an incredible boon for the environment," says Eric Morris, a regular contributor to Freakonomics and a professor of urban planning at Clemson University. He told Freakonomics' Stephen Dubner: "It can also not help the environment or maybe even hurt the environment."
Wait. What?
“Obviously, the energy expenditure in moving around a transit vehicle per passenger mile depends on the number of passengers," Morris continues. "Whether you have one passenger in a bus or 40 passengers in a bus, you're going to be expending almost the same amount of energy. So it all depends on the ridership and the occupancy that transit vehicles and, for that matter, autos carry."
So here comes the rub. The average American car carries 1.6 people -- not many, of course, when you're comparing it to mass transit. On the other hand, the average bus carries only 10 people. And a bus burns a lot more fuel than a car. Not exactly what mass-transit advocates would have us believe.
Click through to see how your state commutes. Explore the interactive map.
Which led Morris to this rather surprising conclusion: "Typically, moving a passenger a mile by bus requires roughly 20 percent more energy than moving a passenger around by car…So, just in terms of energy expenditure, bus actually fares worse than car."
And trains? Trains are on average better than cars, roughly two-thirds of energy per passenger -- although that number is warped a bit by the New York City subway, which is just a monster of efficiency.
The caveat here: it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison, since transportation is so complex. But here's Eric Morris's point: In terms of energy efficiency, mass transit is not the panacea that a lot of people would like to think. Yes, it works great in a dense urban area like New York, but Morris argues that we've already picked a lot of that low-hanging fruit, and that light-rail systems in places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Memphis actually do worse than cars in terms of energy efficiency, simply because they're underused.
"In general, pumping up ridership by constructing new transit systems or adding new transit service has to be looked at very skeptically," he says. "On the other hand, if we can persuade more people to leave cars and move onto the existing transit system that we already have, that's a complete win for the environment."
There are a lot of trade-offs here that are hard to measure. A few examples: commuting time, land usage for parking, the cost of ownership of different kinds of vehicles, and the traffic fatalities that come with car travel.
And you’ve got to consider your success in what Morris says -- persuading people to leave their cars. As the Onion once put it: "98 Percent of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation for Others."
So if liberals hate the idea of discouraging mass transit, here's an idea that conservatives can hate: you can compel people to leave their cars by raising tolls and gas and parking taxes to incentivize more people to ride the transit systems we've already spent billions on.
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I agree that the fuel use of an internal combustion bus, when fully loaded, is only slightly more than when empty. Further, it probably uses just as much fuel at 5 mph as at 20 mph.
However, an electric/hybrid bus uses far less, when loaded lightly, particularly in very low speed city traffic. This is in addition to general efficiencies of the electric motor that puts a far greater fraction of the energy used into forward motion--whilst the internal combustion, universally, wastes about 75%, sloughing it off as heat.
Some cities have transponders, giving priority green lights to public transportation.
The electric bus motor makes NO heat when stopped
The bus never needs a parking place in the city core.
The forty people on board a bus take far less space on the street when compared to spread out in forty cars that need to be parked in the city core.
Do better !
Several questions:
What is one's time worth?
What is mobility worth for someone who doesn't have a car?
What is the gas mileage of a car stuck in traffic?
What does a road cost? Or a parking garage? What are the emissions created in their construction?
The professor's point is well taken, but efficiency is a many faceted measure.
See Jarrett Walker's rebuttal from the perspective of a professional transit planner:
"To put my remarks in context: I’ve been a transit network design consultant for 20 years, and am also the author of the blog HumanTransit.org and the book Human Transit (Island Press, 2011) which rebuts many of the false assumptions in this article.
Morris's argument rests on the false assumption is that transit agencies are all trying to maximize ridership as their overriding objective."
Read the rest here
http://www.humantransit.org/2012/11/eric-morris-on-the-freakonomics-blog...
In most places in the U.S., including most _urbanized_ places in the U.S., it's very inconvenient to get around without a car. This includes many of our "big" metro areas like Houston, Phoenix, and Miami. The point is that there are really only a handful of cities in the country where it's easy to get to work, school, the store, the airport, etc., without driving. This inconvenience figures prominently into this "research" that asserts that driving is "better" than is taking the bus, as far as the environment goes. It is why in most cities that have transit, only the "transit-dependent" ride it - the poor, the elderly, the disabled.
Digging deeper, the question of why it's so inconvenient in most cities to get around by any other means than the car is complicated, and involves history, politics, race, geography, and many other factors. Most cities dramatically expanded their geographic footprint in the Post-WWII era with tracts of low-density single-family homes spreading ever further afield from the "historic core," as well as with the auto-oriented strip development that sprang up along the highways built to serve these far-flung communities. The automobile symbolized freedom, and now that most people could, and did, buy cars, developers needed to accommodate those tastes. Local governments created self-reinforcing feedback loops by zoning their communities for "separated uses" and requiring off-site parking. The walkable suburban towns built before WWII like Montclair, NJ that permeate the suburbs in the Northeast Corridor would not be replicated again. In fact, building such towns today would be illegal in most place, save for a few "New Urbanist" developments like Kentlands, MD and Celebration, FL that remain mostly novelties.
What we are left with is an "urban"*** landscape where most residential areas consist of single-family homes on curving streets and cul-de-sacs, in developments that often only have one entry/exit road (as opposed to a grid connecting to other nearby communities). Our commercial areas are characterized by multi-lane highways dotted with strip shopping centers, offices, and warehouses surrounded by seas of parking lots. The point here is that it's very difficult and downright unpleasant to traverse these regions by any means other than a car. As such, the only folks you see riding the bus in, say, Memphis or suburban Atlanta or Phoenix are the poor, elderly, and infirm. There aren't very many of them riding, and the buses are mostly empty throughout the day. So it's technically correct that, in such places, a person in a car is, on a per-capita basis, using less fuel than a person riding the bus.
The problem is that this misses the point entirely. The reason that New York City residents use less energy per capita than their counterparts in Indianapolis is precisely because they're driving far less on a per-person basis. It's not just that NYC residents ride more buses and trains (that they have trains and Indy doesn't is a related discussion), they often need to cover far less distance to get to their destinations and often have the option of just walking or riding a bike because of the way their built environment is laid out.
Which brings up one more problem - the usage of "passenger miles" to measure the effectiveness of transit. The value of transit should not be tied to distance. A Philadelphian riding the 21 bus down Walnut Street has access to far more "destinations" in the 2 miles of that street spanning Center City than the Norfolk resident who rides a bus down a 2 mile stretch of Virginia Beach Blvd, a conventional suburban arterial. It's no wonder that the Walnut Street bus is always more crowded than the one on VA Beach Blvd. Yet these two trips are treated exactly the same in terms of measuring effectiveness when relying on "passenger miles" as a metric.
Driving a car is not better for the environment than taking mass transit because when everyone has to drive everywhere for everything, everyone uses more energy per person than people living in denser cities who drive relatively little.
***In the United States the definition of "urbanized area" means "core census block groups or blocks that have a population density of at least 1,000 people per square mile (386 per square kilometer) and surrounding census blocks that have an overall density of at least 500 people per square mile (193 per square kilometer)" that add up to at least 50,000 people. 1000 people per square mile is _not_ a high density - it is less than the average population density for the entire state of New Jersey, Pine Barrens and all.
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