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To Really Cut Emissions, We Need Electric Buses, Not Just Electric Cars
An anonymous reader writes: All the EV attention these days is going to Tesla and other sedan manufacturers, but this article makes the case that it's far more important to switch our buses over to electric power than our cars. "Last year, according to the American Public Transportation Association, buses hauled 5.36 billion passengers. While usage has fallen in recent years, thanks in part to the growth of light rail and subway systems, buses still account for more rides each year than heavy rail, light rail, and commuter rail combined—and for about half of all public transit trips." This, while managing around 4-5 miles per gallon of gas, and public buses usually average about 50,000 miles per year. The electric buses themselves are significantly more expensive, but the difference is made up dramatically lower fuel costs. And there will be difficulties: "The range—up to 30 miles—limits Proterra buses to certain routes, so it's hard for an agency to go all in. Drivers have to be trained to brake and accelerate differently, and to maneuver into the docking stations. And Doran Barnes of Foothill Transit notes that some of the cost advantage of using electricity instead of diesel can dissipate. Electric cars can be charged at night, when power prices are low. But buses have no choice but to recharge in the middle of the day, when utilities often impose higher peak usage rates."
I know i'm old but there was a time when most buses ran off electricity using an overhead wire for power transfer. What's with wanting to go to battery power for this use. It's not like we could have forgotten this technology and with an update using today's technology we have to be able to make it better. Buses have defined routes so we can't argue that it limits flexibility...buses aren't cars, they don't have to be able to go down every road.
The largest container ships have huge particulate emissions, but that's because there's no regulation on particulate emissions according to international law. It would be difficult to change that, because regulating ships requires an international agreement. That said, it should be done.
However, ships already have extremely low CO2 emissions per ton-mile. They are already extremely fuel-efficient. The largest ships have 1/15th the fuel usage and CO2 emissions per ton-mile as a tractor-trailer truck, and massively better than your car. If you drive one mile to the store to buy an article of clothing, you have emitted vastly more CO2 than was emitted by shipping it halfway around the globe by containership.
That will have almost no effect on your CO2 emissions.
Ocean going vessels to my understanding have basically no pollution controls on them nor emission standards that they must follow. Consequently they make up some of the worst sources of environmental pollution. Ideally they'd be nuclear powered, but even if they were to implement even basic pollution controls they'd make a world (pun intended) of difference.
They must obey the environmental laws of the port from which they hail. i.e. the flag they fly. This is why huge transport ships will often fly flags of countries that don't even have a port that could harbor the ship. This is where the term "Flag of Convenience" comes from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
In recent years however, many ports will refuse ships that don't meet that ports regulations. Some of the ships output was so horrible that places like California would see air pollution levels sky rocket just because a ship was in port. I read an article once described how a small number of those large ships (16?) put more pollution into the air than the combined output of automobiles in the world combined.
Here the guardian describes how they put out more than 50million cars each: http://www.theguardian.com/env...
Answer:
88% of CO2 travel footprint is generated by cars, 1% by buses.
They're called trollybusses and lots of cities used to have them. Apparently hundreds of cities in the US had them but most of them went away in the 1950's and 1960's. Currently they're only in use in Boston, Dayton, Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco (List of US Trollybusses). I was recently in San Francisco on a tour bus and they said the reason they use them is the electric motor has more torque which is needed to go up the steep hills. I can't speak for why they're still in use in the other cities or why they went out of style in all but 5 cities. Growing up in Dayton I thought they were more common than they are since Dayton isn't that big of a city compared to the others on the list.