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Analysis Says Planes Might Be Greener Than Trains
New Scientist has an interesting piece up about the calculable energy costs per mile for various forms of transportation. Despite the headline ("Train can be worse for climate than plane"), the study it describes deals with highway-based vehicles, too: the authors attempted to integrate not just the cost at the tailpipe (or equivalent) for each mode of transport, but also the costs of developing and supporting the associated infrastructure, such as rails, highways and airports. Such comparisons are tricky, though; a few years back, a widely circulated report claimed that the Toyota Prius had a higher per-mile lifetime cost than the Hummer (see that earlier Slashdot post for good reason to be skeptical of the methodology and conclusions). I wonder how the present comparison would be affected by a calculation of (for instance) how much it would cost to move by plane the freight currently carried by trains.
I can see the logic that large airships which are held aloft passively by lighter than air gases, requiring fuel only for movement being economical, but it might be different with standard planes which require fuel to generate lift.
Yes, rail travel requires resources of iron and such to lay down infrastructure, but that infrastructure is used and maintained for many years and pays off over the long haul. Once down, a diesel locomotive can move immense amounts of cargo for a lot less per mile than other modes of transportation, so it should balance out.
There is the cost of regulations too. An aircraft has a large amount of money put in due to upkeep, far more than a diesel locomotive requires. This isn't to say that a locomotive is completely maintenance free, but it can go a lot more miles than a plane can before requiring service.
Finally, there is the amount of cargo a plane carries versus a train. For example, a $150,000 plane usually can carry less than a $15,000 pickup truck.
As we saw recently in Brazil, airplanes make great fish-food dispensers. French cuisine, mai oui!
The best analysis is the one run in the real world, in real time, called the market.
The very fact that airliners leave their exhaust directly at or near the stratosphere should tell you something. After that, their contrails seed clouds which have an impact on the weather which I can't generalize on here. This reminds me of a study on embodied energy in cities; people were questioning the impact of making all those buildings, but it comes out that the high level of re-use by a densely packed population makes cities a much greener choice for the bulk of the human race.
Well if you think about it just about any innovative technology is going to have extremely high costs up front. Energy efficient cars are only slowly coming down in costs because demand is finally climbing high enough. These overall costs discussed are rather skewed towards existing technologies because of course, mass producing a couple tracks is rather easy now. Think about running those lines a hundred years ago where it was all done by laborers crafting steel.
Stoned4Life
gen = new Random
So what TFA says is that electric trains are only green if the power is generated by non-fossil fuels. Take for example the Portland MAX, whose power is generated by wind farms. (at least they pay for their power to be generated by a wind farm.) This makes the MAX WAAAY green.
Not to mention many forms of freight cannot be carried by air at all, and others have extreme restrictions on the amounts that can be carried in a single air consignment. As IATA say, "some things just aren't meant to fly" - like pyrotechnic security attache cases for example (sorry Mr. Bond, you'll have to send that by road/rail/boat).
I live adjacent to the Union Pacific mainline east/west. Even in this recession, the freight trains are running continuously 24 hours per day. This line is extremely busy. The tonnage which these trains carry is staggering.
There is no way airplanes could move that much freight. We would have to expand the air fleet (and air infrastructure) 100-fold or more to even make a dent in what is handled by our national rail capacity.
This research is essentially stating that what is and is not "green" transportation is significantly dependent on the context of the layout of the region it is located in. This should be obvious but it is not hard to find people that think forcing everyone into the same transportation options regardless of objective context is sound environmental policy. Or in other words, attempting to force people to be "green" often generates more pollution than doing nothing at all, and if you do not change the underlying equilibrium that created the original distribution you will just piss people off as a bonus to your non-accomplishment.
The sad truth is that most American cities are ill-suited to public transportation at the fundamental design level. It would be like trying to make MS-DOS function as an enterprise server environment, the impedance mismatch is extreme. You can't hack an effective and economic public transportation system onto them, and taking a wrecking ball to three-quarters of the American landscape would be expensive beyond belief for a very modest benefit -- you would see more pollution reduction by simply shutting down coal power plants and building nuclear power plants. You have to build the green cities before you can demand people live in them, but for some reason politicians often seem to get that backward.
Even though I am all for green cities, punishing people who live in car-only suburbs is a non-solution because for the most part Americans have no practical choice but to live in such places. For some reason, the same people that refuse to allow the building of green cities as a matter of policy (or at a minimum show a complete lack of political will to propose such things) have no problem coming up with punishments for not living in cities they would not allow to be built. It is a bipartisan failing, even the extreme "environmental progressives" that control the politics where I live rabidly oppose any city development that does not look an awful lot like crappy suburban sprawl.
To me, it seems transportation by trains has benefits that extend well beyond how much energy they use. For example, being able to use electricity generated in any way, rather than being dependent on av-gas, provides a stability and flexibility that planes just can't. While coal may be an ugly way to make power, for America, its supply is certainly more dependable than oil looking forward. Also, being able to reach into the centre of big cities provides a big convenience factor, in my opinion. And trains would seem to be safer (at least in properly made and maintained, grade separated systems).
If you're talking current infrastructure, freight trains are still WAY more environmentally friendly than trucks.
Remember, you only need four modern 4,000 bhp diesel-electric locomotives to pull 180 loaded 53" trailers, not 180 trucks spewing WAY more exhaust emissions (assuming each truck has about 400 bhp pulling power).
The problem with airplanes is that because so much of the structure is needed for aerodynamic lift, the result is a much lower freight load per pound of structure compared to a freight train. That's why interest in super large lighter-than-air vehicles have never completely waned, since they could carry a lot of load per pound of structure.
While this study seems a much better reflection of the total (environmental) cost of each type of transportation, it's important to remember that the marginal cost of you buying a plain ticket or driving your car is not necessarily proportional to the total cost.
For example, to drive one car across the continent may require a massive investment of infrastructure to create a suitable road, but if that road is already there, the infrastructure cost of driving a second car on the same road is essentially zero: you aren't buying any additional infrastructure because of the second car.
I honestly can't imagine ever doing away with our network of highways, regardless of any increase in the popularity of air travel, so a large portion of that infrastructure cost may have nothing to do with whether you personally choose to drive instead of fly. The innercity roads are also a permanent feature: it's not like the plane is going to drop you off at your apartment complex.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
By the fact that they are still used all the time. Freight trains are slow for moving things since there's lots of load/unload time, and you don't get to chose the routing as precisely as by truck. It is the kind of thing that survives only because it is so cheap. It is likely to get even better too, what with hybrid locomotives. All locomotives are electric drive these days. There is just no way to make the kind of transmission you'd need to provide the torque needed to move that thing. Thus you use electric motors, which have 100% torque from the word go. The engine drives a generator which powers the motors.
Ok well not at all hard to add in some batteries to that and a regenerative breaking system. Unlike an automobile where the motors are additional, you just add this in to the existing power system. What's more, locomotives already have to have weight added to them, so unlike a car where the additional weight is undesirable, you just swap out the dead weights for batteries.
GE has a line of hybrid locomotives out and they seem to do real well.
So I'm betting we will continue to see trucks loaded on to trains, shipped to where they need to go, then unloaded for the final journey. It is inconvenient, but when hauling freight it just doesn't get any more economical on land and low shipping cost is the name of the game when large amounts are in question.
Same deal as the massive super freighter ships. You look at their engines and they are massive, some of them take a whole barrel of fuel oil per firing of a piston. However, when you run the math on the amount they carry, you discover they are efficient beyond anything else.
As someone who has read the report (instead of just read articles which summarized it) I can definitively say that that report was, is, and always will be a load of crap.
First off, that report came from a marketing firm, not a serious research organization. Since when are marketing firms experts on lifetime costs.
Secondly, their estimates were that the bulk of the energy costs for each of these cars was in the cost of recycling and/or disposing of the cars. Specifically, for the Prius, a $20,000 car, they estimated that it would take over $100,000 worth of energy to recycle or dispose of it.
Right off, that doesn't pass the simple common-sense test. If it costs $100,000 to recycle or dispose of a Prius, then who is going to be paying that? For all of the cars on the road, they estimated that disposal and/or recycling would cost at least tens of thousands of dollars. Which is to say, if the report is to be believed, scrap yards are all operating at gargantuan loses, since, generally most of them will pay you for your car rather than charge you to haul it away.
My best guess as to the justification of their lunacy is that they're assuming that all of the plastics in a vehicle will be somehow incinerated at some huge temperature or something (rather than simply put in a landfill, which costs way less energy) and they've slipped a digit or two somewhere. But in the end, it's impossible to judge because although they claim to have some very specific break-downs which justify their numbers for each category of the life-cycle, those break-downs are only available if you spend several thousand dollars to purchase the complete version of the report from them.
Does it make sense to, for example, haul coal on planes? I don't believe you can replace trains with planes, or planes with trains.
Is ERL for real? Is it customary nowadays for journals to charge $1900 to to publish an article?
Actually, I think what the parent is saying is that it's not just important to look at what's green (in absolute terms). You have to look at what's greener than what you have now and how you get there from where you are now.
If I'm not mistaken, the poster is all for greener solutions, but greener solutions that are always an incremental change on top of what you already have.
Basically, offering smarts in the US is useless because nobody would drive them. Offering hybrid midsize SUVs makes sense. Yes, we could do better, but then nobody would buy into it and you'd just end up with a backlash from the population.
Anonymous Coward here, pointing out FAIL.
The article regarding the trains is dealing with the emission of greenhouse gasses. The Prius article and timothy both talk about costs (how much money it takes). Emission of greenhouse gasses is not the same as how much money it takes to produce and use something.
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, that is ok. The government does not want you to be smart enough to understand that. Otherwise, our school systems wouldn't suck.
Signing off.
I wonder if the future is full of "semi" airships. With a small onboard fuel supply and a generator, and a load of solar panels on top with electric engines powering some props, couldn't they get something to move at highway speeds, but in a straight line?
No runway, low altitude, and very green if you can come up with a lifecycle for all of the parts.
from TFA:
Cars emitted more than any other form of transport with the notable exception of off-peak buses, which often carry few passengers. Passengers on the Boston light rail, an electric commuter train, were found to emit as much or marginally more than those on mid-size and large aircraft. This is because 82 per cent of electricity in Massachusetts is generated by burning fossil fuels.
So, if you are burning lots of fossil fuels to run your light rail, then yes, it is like a coal fired plane :)
TFA also talks about building trains into major population centers to eliminate the need for infrastructure for cars to _get_ to the train. It also talks about how trains have a different power problem than air/car/bus, and one that, honestly, I think we're a lot closer to solving.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
It's amazing what you can do with a spreadsheet. Fudge things just right, and you can overcome a wall of facts, even a 8 times disadvantage.
Awesome.
But back in the real world, trains and ships can move stuff for pennies a ton-mile, at useful and quiet speeds, with very low emissions, and requiring relatively low-energy infrastructure of wood and iron.
While air transport moves stuff at a cost of almost a dollar a ton-mile, while emitting a whole lot more noise near the endpoints, and requiring a lot more ecological modification, including many square miles of flat and clearcut land for airports. Not to mention the use of huge amounts of electricity to refine the aluminum for the airframes.
Next up, these guys should prove how the optimum diet is one of steak and cherry pie. It can be done.
What if the train killed all its riders. Wouldn't that make make it more green?
Mine is Good
Walking ftw!
Make no mistakes. Rail as an industrial transportation sector predated all (save marine) by almost a century. Initially at the hands of powerful "robber barons" (the Bill Gates of the day), rail has had the time to generate pretty powerful ennemies and longlasting resentment (witness in the canadian west, where "goddammed CPR" is still used as a curse, and likewise in the southwestern US where the Southern Pacific has not mucha in matters of a saint's aura). At the hands of those robber barons, rail has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on overland transportation for about a century before road and air transport managed to get off the ground, generating fortunes and attracting talent that has previously made rail the high-technology sector of it's time.
With talent gone, rail first sank into routine operation and management, and as it slowly started it's long descent into hell (the 1970's), it degraded into crisis management and deferred-maintenance and emergency patch cycles that were no match for the lobbying efforts of the road and air upstarts who had developped an ever increasing arrogance.
Case in point: when the Alaska pipeline was first proposed, Boeing seriously submitted a proposal to fly the oil in special 747-tankers, which could have brought a totally new meaning to the words "black tide"...
Still riding high on it's nouveau-riche influence, the road and air sectors do not see the brink of the collapse they are about to succumb to. First the air with the unprecedented paranoïa that followed 9/11 that brought about billions in governmental support to troubled airlines, and now the bankrupcy of General Motors that will suck even more public money in an industry that was too arrogant to see it's own pitfalls.
In the meanwhile, rail still trundles around, carrying stuff (and some people, too) around without much of a fanfare (save for whistling at crossings).
Elsewhere in the world, rail systems were either developped by the States outright, or with heavy State involvement. That heavy State involvement meant that elsewhere, people were spared the costly shenanigans of private railroads (such as duplicate lines by competing railroads, or outright purchase of competing more-efficient routes), so "other" railroads were far more efficient at providing public service than their U.S. brethen, and did not generate the resentment the robber barons of the gilded age did in the U.S.
And those "other" railroads have managed to pull pretty impressive feats, such as the world's fastest scheduled passenger service, something U.S. railroads would be hard-pressed to manage in the hostile environment they have to deal with. It seems that the only way the U.S. can press forward with improved rail service would be following the utter collapse of other modes of transport...
is always about omitting the context of a conclusion. yes, a prius is less green than a hummer, in certain contexts. yes, a train is less green than a train, in certain contexts. in a limited set of variables, you can conclude an aircraft carrier is greener than a pack mule
for example: fed 0.25 pounds of nuclear fuel, the aircraft carrier was founds to go around the planet a couple of times, while the pack mule was found dead. surely, the aircraft carrier is greener here
for example: by ability to transport aircraft to military hotspots, the aircraft carrier was found to go exactly where needed for a reasonable amount of fuel, while the pack mule merely sat there with a crushed spine
etc., etc.
along any narrow axis of any comparison, you can really say anything you want, and in fact good propaganda does this all the time. that's why it's called "half truths". they are telling you the truth, they only are omitting half of what you need to properly evaluate the value of the statement they are making
beware any "facts" you encounter on any controversial topic: gun control, the environment, islam and terrorism, etc.: lots of "facts" are not really as convincing as they appear at face value, phrased in such a way to tug at your preconceptions and subtle prejudices, instead of actually enlightening you as to any real truth
everyone needs to go into this world with a very skeptical mind, about anything you hear. unfortunately, it is actually those who are most emotionally invested in any number of controversial topics who lose that discipline, and become nothing more than blind kneejerk partisan hacks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Another factor that wasn't considered in TFA: airports tend to be built 'way out in the country, where there aren't a lot of local residents to complain about the noise. Typically, the thousands of acres an airport needs are carved out of prime agricultural land. And if the airport is built next to a major population centre, how do you put a price on the degraded quality of life suffered by thousands of people who have to endure the constant din of landing jets roaring overhead?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The article points out the full buses (such as during rush hour) are more efficient than mostly empty buses during off-peak hours. Unfortunately, that kind of analysis tends to be misused, leading people into looking at individual bus routes and trips on those routes when allocating resources, rather than thinking about the system as a whole.
What they overlook is that a bus saves nothing over my car if I'm taking my car, not the bus. To entice my out of my car regularly, I must be able to rely on the bus. If I take the bus, say, to go out to dinner, and then decide on a whim to catch a movie afterward, I need to be able to know, without having to stop and study a bunch of schedules, that I will be able to get a bus home shortly after the movie lets out. I need to be able to know that I can go to this corner near the theater, and within 15 minutes catch a bus home, without worrying that someone decided when I wasn't paying attention that the routes after 11pm were not cost effective and cut them.
Only by committing to a regular schedule that does not cut trips--even if a particular run of a particular route gets poor ridership for months or years--can a bus system become a real alternative to cars.
Cheap is one factor, and there's also convenience. With infrastructure in mind, trains are the only really sane choice for various types of shipments. Just imagine constantly shipping millions of tons of product back-and-forth across the country?
In the cost factor we have the vehicles themselves, the speed of travel, the congestion, the existing infrastructure, etc.
To do that all by truck would involve a *LOT* of weight. That means special roads, which involves a lot of time to build. -1 convenience for time and -1 for cost.
Then there's the number of "trailers" a truck can haul VS a train. Could you imagine a "B-train" (road-train) with 10-30 trailers? Navigation on open road VS fixed track, steep hills (even with the biggest truck out there), and poor road conditions would make it improbably if not outright impossible. Not to mention the congestion involved.
There simply isn't any other combination of infrastructure and vehicle, even with a boatload of cash, that could be built anytime soon to handle over-land transportation the way a train does. If we one day manage to build antigravity it's a possible, but until then I say trains are here to stay.
For that matter, improving and adding to rail lines between core cities might also make a lot economic sense if done right. I'm Canadian so there's a whole lot of open space here (and in the US) to cross, but perhaps if we focused newer construction technologies and vehicles at the task then perhaps the short-term costs could mean long-term gains. Unfortunately when you have a 4-year turnover no political party would ever likely touch the idea, as the debt taken on in the "now" doesn't stack up against the possibility of their opponents being in power at completion (if not nixing the idea partway through).
Well, this is not about the study, but there are guys around the world flying solar-electric sailplanes ( http://solar-flight.com/ ). This is definitely greener than any internal-combustion engine car, or even greener than a electric car charged with electricity from coal powerplant.
Plus, sailplanes go above clouds, so they have power as long as they want.
Locally (Canada) frost-heaves in winter and then erosion in spring count for a significant amount of road damage. The frozen ground pushes up underneath the roads and causes them to crack, then resettles as things warm up. Meanwhile melting causes flows of ground-water that can undermine roads, or wash away parts of them in a mudslide/landslide.
Then you get other fun things like vegetation which can slowly but surely take out sidewalks and streets with creeping roots, floods, floating trees damaging bridges, debris on tracks causing derailments, and moose kicking up concrete.
OK, just joking about the moose, but the rest are pretty common events which necessitate a regular cycle of road patching, repair, and replacement.
I actually wonder what the cost is of maintaining tracks VS roads.
Another thing it doesn't get into is the existing technology for running trains directly from electric lines. If you think about it, rail is the only freight transportation method which can be powered DIRECTLY from renewable energy sources like wind, solar and hydro, using existing tested and proven technology.
Earlier this year I flew from Paris to Bangkok and was reading the information sheet of the Boeing 777-200 on which I was flying. The 777-200 is one of the most fuel-efficient long-haul aircrafts there is. So the consumption is 0.022l of Kerosene per (km*passenger) (liters per kilometer per passenger). That's better than many cars, if you drive alone, which most people, sadly, do. So if you look at it from this angle, the 777-200 is more fuel-efficient.
But here comes the kick: from Paris to Bangkok is nearly 10.000Km. So to ship my white ass between the two points, I was responsible for consuming some 200l of Kerosene! I felt rather bad when we landed, as I imagined 200 liters of kerosene burned up in the atmosphere, just for my enjoyment (I was consoled rather quickly, though, as Thai women are the most beautiful in the world. If there was any justice, we'd have all the Miss World winners from Thailand.).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I seem to remember quite a few cases cropping up after a (recently sold) railway starting sending bills to landowners for crossing into their property. Basically the railway abutted the property, and made it impossible to access without crossing the railway. As the existing crossings were owned by the new rail company, they decided to bill the landowners tens of thousands ($) each in order to be able to access their own land in the same manner they had been doing for decades.
There are many things that would greatly benefit from being public, and transportation - when done correctly - is definitely one of them. I say "when done correctly" because greedy government managers are no better than greedy private owners.
For example, see the issues with ICBC (insurance corporation of British Columbia, the monopoly vehicle insurance branch of the government) in the westernmost province. ICBC absolutely loves to screw people in accidents, because it gives them an excuse to raise premiums and take away "safe driver" discounts. Without competition, people in accidents are forced into lengthy court battles, often after being injured and while slowly burning through their own savings while unable to work. Even being found 5% at-fault is enough excuse to yank away a few years of accumulated safe-driver discounts, so they'll try to nail you for being rear-ended by a tailgater, while stopped, or equally ludicrous such things.
I'm not really sure what the answer is to that, other than perhaps a truly publicly owned corporation. Maybe if all citizens had a share (and a say) they could at least have enough power to address some of those issues, but then again when less than 50% of people even show up to vote, who knows.
There's one really simple metric for measuring this. The cost of the ticket in economy class. It's not scientifically accurate but it should give a rough idea. And currently in many cases trains are more expensive for long distances. But for cargo they're obviously much cheaper.
Aside from scheduling, the bus has to overcome the whole "ghetto on wheels" issue.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The article clearly compares the environmental impact on the basis of passenger miles (per kilometre for each traveller on board). You can't measure freight hauling in passenger miles. You are not talking about the same thing as the article.
The article neglects the way that the transportation infrastructure affects how much transport is needed. If you rely on cars and trucks for most transport you end up with low-density sprawl and hence a very high number of miles travelled. If you rely on trains and bicycles you end up with high-density development and hence a much lower number of miles travelled.
In other words, when comparing transport modes you can't assume that the amount of miles will be the same.
Taken at face value this study is all doom and gloom about how much exhaust is generated.
But what I keep seeing is those empty seats, and last I checked there are empty seats everywhere. Empty seats on a bus makes it worse than an SUV, so stop riding the bus and get an SUV, right? Empty seats on a light rail makes it almost as bad as a plane, so go take a plane to work, right?
It seems odd that thier findings talk about the tailpipe exhaust but do they take into account the costs of using various forms of transport? If you want to drill down on the cost, shouldn't you factor in how much pollution it takes for someone to buy the plane ticket in the first place? Let's see, if the plane to work is $100.00 (for simplicity's sake) and the bus to work is $1.00 (again for simplicities sake) and you make $10.00/hour in Boston where "82 per cent of electricity... is generated by burning fossil fuels" then a 10 hour day of e;ectrical use more than likely destroys all savings from the bus with only 5 people on it.
I still find it odd that people try to quantify things but only so much that they can skew the numbers to thier desired effect.
Truth is, how much worse would we be environmentally if we took away all the trains and put it all on planes? Imagine those 100+ coal cars now needing to be flown from the mine to the power plant. So now we need an airport at both ends, and the long runways, and the environmental impact there. Yes, there are probably better solutions to some of our transportation needs, but studies like these don't really do anything to address them when they sensationalize thier results.
The mighty wisdom of 'The Market', LOL. Mod parent up for being just plain right.
The Market being efficient, or even rational is a economic masturbatory fantasy that starry eyed economists with blabber about endlessly. The market is huge numbers of misinformed, and lazy people with a imperfect view of the products that 'the market' offers, being bombarded with suspect and deceptive advertising created by companies driven by profit motivations to sell whatever they offer for the highest price they can get away with.
Markets will push competition and punish stagnation. That is about it, they cannot be counted on as some sort of all knowing divining machines. They are about as rational as their lowest common denominator element, and that quite frankly is nothing to base an economic religion around.
As a case in point, the market could not even say which is more efficient, because SOME PEOPLE ARE AFRAID TO FLY, and they would choose other forms of travel based off of fear. Not cost, not efficiency, but fear.
That, my good sir, is precisely the problem with the omnibus. Every time I've ridden the omnibus there is someone so offensive on board I'm about to...can't even finish this sentence I'm so angry at them still. They have their headphones in, but I can hear their "hip hop" music. If I can hear it, how loud are they listening to it? Last time I was on there was some girl trying to speak French to her boyfriend or some over creature over her cellular telephone. She kept on saying "je t'aime" with the worst accent I've ever heard; it sounded like "shuttem".
I get messy with the bicycle instead generally. Only take the bus when I'm with someone else and that's their mode of transport. Weirdos.
If you could clean the trash out then the bus would be down-right pleasant. But ay, there's the rub: If you could clean the trash out the whole world would be down-right pleasant, you'd be lord and saviour, and it's never going to happen. Yes, that last bit is anacoluthon as well.
In less developed countries like USA the major part of all trains run on diesel and oil. Here in Sweden almost all trains run on electricity.
You just build more farms is all.
And intermittency can be dealt with a number of well-known strategies, starting with keeping fossil fuel stations around for emergencies, storing energy in reversable dams, displacing usage dynamically by having industrial refrigerators run a few degrees lower, and so on and so forth.
More or less. They require minimal maintenance, especially compared to every single other electricity generation method but solar.
And if you quit calling it an "omnibus" everyone on the bus would quit calling you a "prick" which would, I'm sure, make your time on the bus more pleasant.
I haven't a clue what to do about the French people, though.
And maintenance is low tech, requires mostly steel. Just look at Britain, where they even have 80 year old wagons (or something) in service, thanks to the wonder of privatization.
Airports take a lot of room. A motherfucking lot. It surely evens out for long haul flights, but other than that ...
... sincerely, so what ? How come, calculations of fuel consumption and pollution of army vehicles (planes, trucks, ships, submarines, carriers (!)) and of industries are less frequently slapped in our face than those of public transport and cars? They frequently preach us about how much pollution our cars produce, but all of it pales in comparison to army pollution. Also, there are very many trains that carry more people than most smaller planes, and they travel more frequently, and even more so on smaller distances. Who gives a rat's ass whether a plane pollutes less when there's no option to go with a plane on a gazillion routes?
Now let's talk about some topic that matters even less (if you can find one).
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Rail infrastructure isn't made from wood, or iron. These days it is concrete, steel and glass. All of which are highly energy intensive to produce.
This is for example, the German cathedral to rail:
http://www.hdr-photos.com/data/media/17/Hauptbahnhof---750x499.jpg
Now, if you want to run freight over wooden sleepers at 30mph, go right ahead. Try that with a 150mph passenger train and you'll have a lot of grieving families to explain to. The result is that rail infrastructure is very energy intensive, for thousands of miles.
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I didn't RTFA, but the entire premise is stupid as observed by various other posters. In India, the railways transports over 18 million passengers and more than 2 million tonnes of freight daily. Also consider the fact that you have locomotives powered by electricity and not diesel at the metros. Their energy efficiency is directly related to the grid.
What next? Walking is more energy efficient than flying?
So what TFA says is that electric trains are only green if the power is generated by non-fossil fuels. Take for example the Portland MAX, whose power is generated by wind farms. (at least they pay for their power to be generated by a wind farm.) This makes the MAX WAAAY green.
Not disagreeing with the latter comment, but surely electric trains are at least greener than, say, diesel-electric in that...
Even saying that, surely even diesel-electric trains are greener than road haulage.
That, my good sir, is precisely the problem with the omnibus. Every time I've ridden the omnibus there is someone so offensive on board I'm about to...can't even finish this sentence I'm so angry at them still.
Yes, but every time I use a car in rush hour traffic instead of the bus or the underground, I invariably get close to road rage as always there is someone so aggressive and obnoxious on the road that I'm about to...
But ay, there's the rub: If you could clean the trash out the whole world would be down-right pleasant, you'd be lord and savior, and it's never going to happen.
Indeed.
At least compare apples with apples.
1: An express passenger train requires megawatts to run. They run (here in Germany) at 200mph, not 30mph. That's a lot more energy. Power has to increase with the square of velocity for rail, in *exactly* the same way as with air travel.
2: You cannot run 200mph passenger trains over old freight lines. How many dead bodies do you want on your hands? That means thousands of miles of concrete and steel, both of which are *very* energy intensive to produce.
The difference between high speed rail and planes isn't nearly as clear cut. Why not try comparing a horses and carts against a jet and see which is more environmentally friendly.
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The market will tell you what is the correct cost ...
Presuming an efficient market. With all the components that go into a cost as being correctly priced, with no market distortions, such as subsidies.
As it is, we don't have a flat and fair market. Farmers get subsidies, energy users don't pay the full price for their CO2 emissions and road / rail users don't pay the going rate for infrastructure access (incl. maintenance costs).
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Even saying that, surely even diesel-electric trains are greener than road haulage.
AIUI, until recently there wasn't much incentive for efficient diesel locomotives -- fuel was cheap, and there weren't controls on pollutants in the same way as there are for road vehicles. As fuel cost becomes a more and more significant cost of running the train new locomotives will become more efficient.
monkeys don't fly
Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man would beg to differ.
* Toto would probably agree with you, but he's a dog and they tend to be ridiculous.
That makes a HUGE difference.
What they overlook is that a bus saves nothing over my car if I'm taking my car, not the bus. To entice my out of my car regularly, I must be able to rely on the bus. If I take the bus, say, to go out to dinner, and then decide on a whim to catch a movie afterward, I need to be able to know, without having to stop and study a bunch of schedules, that I will be able to get a bus home shortly after the movie lets out. I need to be able to know that I can go to this corner near the theater, and within 15 minutes catch a bus home, without worrying that someone decided when I wasn't paying attention that the routes after 11pm were not cost effective and cut them.
You overlook some things as well, or rather, you sound as if you do your best to overlook them and woudn't give good public transport a chance even if it were available. When you use public transport on a regular basis you know perfectly well how frequent the connections are and when the last bus home will depart. And if you don't yet know this you look it up before you go to dinner. You won't need to re-study the schedules untill they change, which will be at predictable moments once or twice a year and will be well publicized. You'll accept a less then 15 minute interval because it won't come as a surprise and having a good time will be worth it. If you have to wait long enough to allow it you will probably drink another beer with your friends after the movie, which you can safely do because you don't have to drive.
The problem is that these comparisons are difficult to do. The only way to accurately allow estimations of such climate-efficiency is to impose climate-taxes.
Make every company pay for their emissions into the environment. So the costs of producing electricity will go up because the electricity company has to pay for their CO2 emissions. Similarly the steel mill producing the steel for the hummer will charge higher prices because of the CO2 they produce, and to compensate for the higher electricity bill.
Eventually throughout industry a new price-level will stabilize and in the train tickets and airline tickets their relative climate-efficiency will show through. People will feel the climate-inefficiency of the hummer (or the prius if you believe that report) in the amount they have to pay.
Oh, because taxing all citizens for the CO2 that their cars produce is not feasable, you add a tax on the fuels: The amount of CO2 per gallon of fuel is easy to calculate.
And... because this will shift prices significantly, it is not feasible to start these taxes all at once. So besides that the eventual rates should be known in advance, so that companies can change their investment patterns to for example build more CO2 efficient plants in the years that ramp up the cost of emitting CO2 into the environment.
There are some difficult problems: What is the CO2 equivalent price of radioactive wastes? This depends a lot on for example the cost of "suppose 100 years from now the storage facility generates a leak causing 100 square miles of our country to become inhabitable". The chances of that happening are small, difficult to estimate, but the resulting cost to the environment so enormous that they do make a contribution to the "global-environmental-cost" of using nuclear energy.
Another problem is that this doesn't make sense to do in just one country. This has to be done globally otherwise it is tremendously unfair for companies that are in a country that taxes its companies compared with those that are in a country that doesn't tax its companies. (You might be able to add those taxes at the border. So competition inside a country becomes fair. And the "other country" will see that the taxes that they could've charged end up being charged at the border, and flow into the foreign government, providing an incentive for them to implement the taxes....)
If all the anecdotal accounts of air travel are anything to go by, planes spend so much time grounded due to weather, mechanical problems, sitting on the tarmac for hours after boarding and/or before unboarding, etc... or flights cut short due to diversions that they hardly spend any time flying and thus burning fuel.
It's not just a shitty way to travel, is a shitty and environmentally friendly way to travel!
=Smidge=
That's nice and all, but in most American cities, if you want to find out the bus schedule on the go, you will have to pull out a PDA, drill down through a website usually designed for IE6 and IE6 only. I know a town nearby mine actually forces people to use user agent hiding if they are using any other Web browser than IE, elsewise they are told they are accessing the Web page on an unauthorized browser.
Then, once you find that the last bus out of downtown leaves at 11:00, and no buses will be coming until 6:00am, all the money saved by taking a bus for a few years goes down the toilet with the taxi fare required to get home, or in some extreme cases, a hotel room.
Oh, and this is assuming bus service actually goes places. In most of the US, good luck finding a bus to take someone from a bedroom community to downtown in a timely fashion to get to a job reliably.
Mainly money. The yearly subsidies to the German railroad system amount to about 20 billion Euros (by the German state). Germany has the best (in comfort and densest of) railroad system in the world. Also the most expensive one (in tickets). 20 billion Euros come in addition to that. Those 20 billion are about 3% of our GDP. Every. Single. Year. Imagine what you could get for that if you spend it on education.
There are always trade-offs. And even though the US is not the best in public transportation this does not mean it is all bad. Or that it couldn't be fixed. Bus lines are easily installed and can run on roads. And the US has a very good road system. Busses can then run on hybrid or natural gas. They are very flexible. As compared to trains.
Frederick, MD is one of the spots where the MARC Train (http://www.mtamaryland.com/services/marc/) has its endpoints. While the trains only run during the mornings and afternoon during the week, the trains are left running all weekend. Don't know the impact of shutting a train off for the weekend, but you can certainly hear the diesels running and spewing toxins into the air.
But that isn't how much damage is done.
The damage depends on the MOMENTUM.
Mass times velocity.
And that "mass" is the grip coefficient.
While we're here, please show me a civilian car that has four wheels and weighs 16 tons...
I was trying to find the interview that had and one of the searches "dundee rep pink limo" from google came up with THIS comment back.:P
sorry, sorry, sorry
Maybe we need to rethink the way we plan cities.
That's a great idea if we can rewind the calendar to 1790 and start over. The big problem is that re-thinking how we plan cities is that by and large our cities are already built and already have massive infrastructure investments already built and in use, with signficant economies built around the infrastructure arrangement.
What we need to do is think about how we can *adapt* our cities & infrastructure in incremental ways that increase energy efficiency, decrease congestion and provide better-service incentives to motivate people to use them.
Incrementalism is important because we can't afford to change overnight and we need to give time to both people and organizations to get in sync with the program.
It's also critical that the systems put in place provide *better* service than existing methods. The religious converts to environmentalism will put up with worse systems for their philosophical/moral value, but most other people won't, which often leads to either failure for projects or punitive changes that create political backlash.
Everyone knows that if one part of a Boolean equation is false, then the entire equation is false. For those that beat the drum for transporting goods at ANY cost, TFA is a fog generator in the battle to keep their livelihoods. Humanity has heated up the planet, there is no question of it. One only needs to see a photo of the polar regions to quickly notice that the ice is disappearing. The missing water is going somewhere, and only a fool, or a show-off would casually ignore this fact.
the former is not carrying the weight of the diesel engine + alternator
So what? You're talking a couple additional tons, compared to a couple thousand tons of cars and cargo. Hardly something to worry about. Add on the fact that rolling drag of iron wheels on iron track is extremely small, the only measurable loss would be from additional energy consumption during acceleration, and that can be recovered through regenerative breaking.
the former can do regenerative braking.
And the latter can't? In the end, they're both electric locomotives. Who's to say you can't just add a battery, or more likely a capacitor bank, to the diesel electric one. GE made a lot of noise in the press about five years ago, including several TV ads, when they started doing this in their Evolution line.
I also believe in taxing the carbide emissions. Some one should check to see how poisonous school buses are. I drive one for a living and the hundreds of thousand of buses in this country running off of diesel is disgusting. Check into those and you will see what is helping to destroy the environment
Also interesting to compare bus versus car. Figure 3 in the report shows, for example, that a normal gasoline car with five people is better in most respects, for energy consumption and emissions, than a bus filled to about 75%. Only when a bus is 100% full does it get better numbers than a full car, and then only by a small margin.
But of course that doesn't matter for the environmental fundamentalist filling my town with those damn buses. Never mind that here the buses are mostly full of students who would walk or ride a bicycle around this small 100K town if there were no buses.
This might quickly become a moot point if fuel costs continue to rise since electric trains date back to the turn of last century and electric jumbo jets...
The conclusion that a train may be "less green" than a plane is somewhat dependent on what you look at. The article notes that this is because the particular train they looked at, the Green Line in Boston, uses local power that is being generated from carbon-emitting sources. Actually, even that is only part of the story... you can read the original research (http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/4/2/024008/erl9_2_024008.html) if you have some kind of institutional subscription to Environmental Research Letters. It shows that the energy use is actually lower or the train, and that another train (SF muni) does beat the "large aircraft" (the small aircraft is much worse).
Since they are diesel engines, I assume trains could run on bio diesel. Anyone know anything on this?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
not just CO2 emissions.
What puzzles me is that, intuitively, the cost of infrastructure construction is amortized to be negligibly small over many runs of freight. However, the report still claims that it is a significant factor. Also, data are shown only up to regional commuter rail, but high speed trains are not compared in this report. On the other hand, they show data for large commercial aircrafts.
I once had a signature.
And you're assuming the fucking bus actually saves money.
I lived in Marietta for a while, at SPSU, in a dorm. Without a car for an entire year. And no internet in the dorms for the first six months. Luckily, there was a bus station literally 150 yards away from my dorm, at the front of the school.
It came every 30 minutes, and was usually roughly on time, so I never had trouble catching it. It went right to the Cobb Galleria Center where there was a large mall, nice bookstores and movie theaters in walking distance, etc. 25 minutes away. 5 miles. I must have done this trip 10 times a month, for eight months. The route was perfect, except the last bus was at 10:30 and most of the stores were open until 11, but I could live with that.
Then I got a car. ~28 MPG. And I looked at the two $1.50 tickets I had to buy to ride the bus, and I looked at $1.25 a gallon gas, and I did the math. Even in the stop and go traffic, the trip cost me a third as much in my car. Oh, and I could stay until 11, or even see a movie later, and I could go by the grocery store on the way back, etc. Oh, and it took half the time.
I didn't ride the bus ever again.
The only people who road mass transit in that town were people without cars. Anyone who had to have a car, for whatever reason, would not be using the buses. Hell, at their prices, it might have been cheaper to buy a car regardless.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
If one actually reads the article, and in particular looks carefully at Figure 1, which compares the different modes of transportation, the allegedly counterintuitive results are absent.
What is actually shows:
In short: if you are looking for surprising counter-intuitive results, you'll have to look elsewhere. This really just confirms the truth in conventional wisdom.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Yes, but any time I ride a bus in congested traffic, it takes about a half hour to move a mile. It is much faster to use a bike and navigate between lanes of traffic. Or better yet, use the subway line that is about a block away.
Imagine when we all have jetpacks as our mode of transportation. That will be AWESOME, except there will be no privacy in your back yard anymore.
Screw the negative! Jetpacks yay!
The "flat and fair market" is a mythical beast only spoken of by libertarians, it does not exist nor can exist. Under a laissez-faire market one company/organisation/individual will always leverage their advantage over another even if all conditions are equal. If left alone in many cases this leveraging will lead to monopolies, some natural and some abusive, proper regulation is to ensure that abusive monopolies cannot continue to slant the market in their favour.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Someone forget to check "Post Anonymously"?
LOL.
trains can be powered by
wind-generated electricity.
I (GP) started with saying GGP sounded as if he wouldn't give good public transport a chance even if it were available, and I went on to describe how it works were I live (Amsterdam).
If I need to take a less familiar route I look it up on this website, which combines all types of public transport available from all public transport companies operating in the Netherlands in a single door-to-door route planner. And yes, it works in Firefox.
And you're assuming the fucking bus actually saves money.
There are places and circumstances where it does. Certainly not everywhere, but it can be a valid assumption.
Again The Chem Trail is skipped right over.
And they have a version for mobile mobile devices as well: http://www.9292mobiel.nl/.
I'm sure there are places, but doing the math in Marietta blew my mind.
The real joke is, for $0.25 cheaper, in Atlanta, you can buy a ticket on a bus, ride it into the subway station, ride the subway, and then get off and get on another bus. You could essentially keep swapping transports for free until you had to step outside the system.
In Marietta, OTOH, you got exactly one transfer. And a higher ticket price, and buses that ran every 30 minutes instead of 10-15, and no subway.
Mass transit systems tend to suffer from exactly the same issue I'm having to convince the theatre I volunteer at: The people running them don't realize that empty seats cost money, and full seats have no cost. If you're running the bus anyway, run it with people in it.
And, perhaps more importantly, don't price yourself higher than alternate, more convenient, things.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
How is that possible if train transportation is 12 times more effective than car transportation. It is absolutely sensless. To build railway can cost large amount of energy, but after it will return quickly because electricity powered train consumes a fraction of energy that plane consumes. I think this is one of those articles ordered by some stupid big company. Same as those about dangers of smoking or cell phone radiations.
How can you convert construction costs into figures that amount to something-per-year or -per-kilometer?! You have to assume a life-time, but how long is that? One year? Ten years? A thousand years?
For cars or busses or trains or aircraft you can do this, because those things have a defined lifetime after which they are scrapped.
But you cannot do that for roads or rails, because they won't be scrapped and rebuild anew, they will be maintained and reworked! So the construction costs are one-time only and cannot be included in the figures.
Well, to be honest, your car being cheaper is only due to ridiculously cheap fuel in the US. In Europe, petrol easily costs six times as much. Also, you don't seem to include the car maintenance, writedown on its value and road taxes in your calculations.
Then again, a bus that only comes once every half hour as the only public transport option really sucks.