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New Study Suggests Flying Is Greener Than Driving
New submitter Desert Leap writes: The Washington Post reports a new study that suggests it is more environmentally friendly to fly rather than to drive. Analysis from the University of Michigan Transport Research Institute found that driving uses 57% more energy than flying per passenger mile. This is largely due to the number of occupied plane seats increasing while passengers per car decreased. Of course, "results may vary" for individual trips depending on many factors, such as distance flown (long flights are more fuel efficient) and the kind of car, and how many riders. One factoid is interesting: it takes 4,211 BTUs per person mile to drive. This number will fall as we switch over to electric vehicles. For example, a Tesla Model S takes about 1,100 BTUs per vehicle mile. Will future aircraft be able to also make the switch to electric?
Nothing really too new. If you take the bus and the bus is full you are more efficient for the work being performed.
Most of the energy goes into moving the actual machine, only a small fraction goes into moving its content.
That is why the Train shipping companies advertise 1 gallon of fuel, for 500 miles per Ton of goods.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Either compare flying a small plane to driving a car, or compare a huge bus to a plane.
Flying costs a lot more, and involves a period of being completely at the mercy of the no-background-check employees of the TSA.
I don't care if it is green. The TSA is horrible. Get rid of it, and I might fly again. Until then, I will spring for the road trip.
On average, buses are far worse than cars for energy efficiency because of the low average load factor.
On what data is this assertion based? I spent a few minutes seeing if such data exist. I could not find data to support your claim that buses are far worse.
I found the following. A bus fuel efficiency is about 5 mpg [1]. That is with fifty-five passengers, which is the maximum capacity and therefore our lower bound. In my county, the average load-factor over all of 2012 was 479 million passenger miles divided by 44 million vehicle miles, or 10 passengers per mile.
Our average fuel consumption over number of passengers then is 50 mpg, which is not far worse than cars for energy efficiency. In 2006, the average mpg of a private vehicle on the road was about 20 mpg. Even with two people in such a vehicle, the average-loaded bus is better.
I did not dig very deeply; I was more trying to find your data and stumbled into data that seems to paint a different picture. It's quite possible that my data paints the wrong picture and you were using much more sound data, but because you did not provide it, I must ask for a citation now.
Which data had you used?
[1] http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy00o...
[2] http://metro.kingcounty.gov/am...
[3] http://www.project.org/info.ph...