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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.
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.
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.
I don't understand your point. Are you suggesting that commercial plane production benefits from economies of scale? To some degree, sure, but I don't think you can really call it mass production in the same way that we talk about it with other transportation methods.
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.
No, it's not.
The market will tell you what is the correct cost of USING a plane or a train RIGHT NOW. It doesn't reflect any sunk costs whatsoever, nor will it reflect future costs or non-immediate costs not mandated by law.
By way of analogy: the market tells the farmer what crops people will buy. It does not tell him what crops will keep his farmland sustainable unto his children's time.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
The sad truth is that most American cities are ill-suited to public transportation at the fundamental design level.
Maybe we need to rethink the way we plan cities. Suburban-oriented development needs to stop NOW. We don't have the space or the resources to support it. There's no reason why we can't change our zoning laws to encourage new development to be constructed in a more practical fashion.
Many recently constructed suburbs (ie. anything around DC) don't even offer the typical advantages that the suburban lifestyle promised. Houses are crammed onto tiny lots in a traffic-congested area that provides no businesses or services within walking distance. It is literally the worst-case scenario.
The "insufficient" population density argument is bullshit. New Jersey has a higher population density than all of the European states and Japan, and yet most of the state has zero access to a public transportation system that will deliver them somewhere other than New York or Philadelphia. I lived in a rural Scottish town for a short while that had public transportation options that were lightyears better than anything I can get living in NJ, just across the river from NYC.
France has one of the best high-speed rail networks in the world (and has had it since the 70s). Most of France is extremely rural, and yet the TGV system provides access to a huge portion of the country. The eastern seaboard of the US has 4 major cities arranged in a straight line, and we somehow can't figure out how to provide reasonable rail transportation between them. The Acela is barely faster than driving, and costs 10x as much.
I lived in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia for a while, and attempted to do my commute via public transportation at first. Geographically, the area is composed of a narrow peninsula (~10-15 miles wide) connecting Richmond to Virginia Beach. The 60mi stretch from Williamsburg to VB is very densely populated. The situation practically cries for a commuter rail line down the peninsula, with a few well-placed bus routes around the urban centers. Instead, we have numerous 4-lane traffic-clogged highways, and the world's most disjointed bus network. My fairly straightforward commute to work (25 minutes by car, basically on one road) took over 2 hours by bus.
It's often said that only poor people ride the bus. In the case of Hampton Roads, I was tempted to believe that the people on the bus were poor because they never got to work on time.
The naysayers are wrong. The US isn't terribly special. We CAN fix this. Yes, we've made a few bad urban planning decisions over the past 40 years, although much of the rest of the world made those same mistakes.
The costs are justified. The economy can't survive another prolonged $5/gal gas spike. Fixing the means by which transportation works in America is far more important than any war we're fighting (and coincidentally, would have prevented the one we're currently embroiled in)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
It would really make more sense to start an electric bus and cab fleet than to roll out high speed rail, at least in the immediate term. Long term, the nation needs a plan - something on the level of the highway system, something that will work and can actually be implemented - that can satisfy mass transit and rapid transit needs while keeping them affordable. Air transport is already very expensive and relatively inaccessible, and the price only goes up with oil. The same, I learned a few years ago, goes for Amtrak.
Here's a stupid idea:
Say you have a bus. Some kind of crazy miracle WTF electric bus that can roll onto an electrified track like a rail truck, connect to the third rail, travel one way at a high speed on this line (while recharging, maybe) but then decouple in an instant with the rail and go over the road. The bus fleet can already serve a city as it is, over the road, but then say you start putting high speed lines between places where you'd usually have, say, a monorail. (Got one of these in Indy for the hospitals.) Sure, it's a glorified street car, but it's not confined to the line, no wrecking balls on day one for this one. But you COULD put the tracks in over time. You COULD upgrade the service. You MIGHT be able to diversify it for truck freight. We already stick extra lanes on highways all the time, so why not use one of those lanes as ballast for a dedicated super-light track?
It'd sure cut down on the truck related accidents here if the things were hard to derail, and at the ends of the track or at given decoupling points it could just drive onto the road. Oh, look, the track lane is ending, let's just merge onto the highway.
By way of analogy: the market tells the farmer what crops people will buy. It does not tell him what crops will keep his farmland sustainable unto his children's time.
Problem here is that when the crops are determined *for* the farmer by a politician or bureaucrat to keep the land "sustainable" (both the crops chosen and the definition of sustainable made by someone other than the farmer that lives many hundreds of miles away and doesn't particularly care about the farmers' individual well being) it often means the farmer can't make enough from his crops to pay the mortgage/taxes/other costs of that farm.
So his children may never have a chance to use the land, but probably a corporate mega-farm paying sufficient protection money...oops, "campaign contributions and lobbyist-paid excursions" may.
If the farmer decides, he has a vested interest in keeping the land producing by reinvesting in maintaining it and keeping it sustainable for his children & grandchildren.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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....)
A: 200 mph is not a necessity - it's a luxury.
If you want to be competitive with commuter air travel over distances of 500 miles or so, it certainly helps if you can go fast.
B: 50 mph trains run just fine on old antiquated rail lines.
My car will go faster than that on the highway, for less money, and more convenient, too.
There is little difference between moving freight, and moving people. You have x tons of mass that have to get from points a through z to points 1 through 26. Load the freight, restrain the freight against unexpected movement, accelerate smoothly, go fast as safely possible, decelerate smoothly, and dump the freight. Rinse and repeat until all the freight has been ejected.
From a physics perspective, you are correct, but from a practical perspective, no.
Freight trains are very efficient at moving heavy cargo at slow speeds over long distances, at low cost. The route does not have to be all that efficient, and there is plenty of freight that just has to get there eventually.
Passengers are MUCH more time-sensitive than freight. They don't weigh much (compared to freight), so you need a LOT of passengers to achieve the economies of scale that make trains efficient. A freight customer might buy 50 carloads of coal, whereas a passenger buys one SEAT. And when the train is slow, or the route inefficient, passengers rapidly switch to other forms of transit (car, and plane being the two most popular). This is why Amtrak is a perpetual money pit. Passenger rail requires government subsidies just about everywhere (except perhaps Hong Kong), while freight trains are a self-sustaining business.
I wholly disagree. I think the suburban design is very close to being a system of capillaries needed to support the arteries. A van could circulate through the main roads of my subdivision in 30 minutes and drop people off at a stop on "the main draw". A traditional bus could then pick everybody up an head to the next stop. Down that main draw, my work is only 7 miles away -- a 15 minute ride if we have to stop a few times. Say I'm halfway through the route in my subdivision (I am), that would be a 30 minute commute. Twice my normal commute, sure, but still reasonable. I'd take it, if it were economical. If they took everybody like me who was willing if it were made smart, then they'd have enough funds to start operating more vehicles and it would be even better for everybody (the second vehicle could to in the opposite circle).
Instead, a bus comes by my house once an hour, and instead of going to the main artery, heads down the interstate 5 miles to a park and ride. After taking that 45 minute bus ride, I could take the 30 minute bus to work. That's insane.
Instead of rethinking suburbia, telling people where to live based on where they work, essentially planning to rip up 75-90% of metropolitan areas and replace it with some urban planned concept, we need smarter people running mass transit. Instead of allowing them to hand-pick people who are already on the bus and finding ways for their lives to be better, they need to pick people in major population centers (subdivisions) and come up with some different ideas. Around here, if you can drive to a park and ride, the only thing that makes any sense at all is a cross-town bus, and they have high ridership. The local routes are exclusively for the people who can't afford their own transportation and for the people who are mandated by the court not to drive.
I am not convinced that market forces would not have addressed pollution issues in a way that was as good or better than the one we chose.
It is not my job to convince you of things that are fairly obvious.
There is no plausible means by which companies would have stopped polluting by themselves. If public opinion had turned against them, they would have simply polluted in secret, like I said. Or they simply would have purchased land far away from their workers and market and dumped there, safe from anyone voting with their wallet. Or even done that secretly.
Your worship of the market is silly. The market operates to make companies the most money, which, once we remove the ability for companies to commit certain types of fraud and collusion, results in them creating the cheapest products via competition, via the most efficient means.
'the efficient solution', however, does not mean 'the superior solution' for society at large. See, for example, Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle' for the most efficient meatpacking industry.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?