JUL 27

But for rapid intercity travel, the rail network should really be improved.

In an ideal (my ideal, anyway) world, trains would ferry people between large metros, while inter-city buses deliver people to smaller cities. From there, bikes or buses can perform the "last mile", so to speak.

Maybe it's just the fact that I really dig riding trains. I'm going to schedule a trip to Chicago sometime soon on Amtrak with my sister, and my wife and I prefer rail to go visit our family in CT. We just need more rail in the central area of the country to make it more feasible.

Thanks for the link Hank, keep up the good work.

Its funny how actually the lowest tech things - bicycle, walking, train, bus - are the most environmentally friendly transportation options. Not only do they cause the least amount of emissions, but the resources used and the pollution created in manufacturing the needed demand is much less compared to the personal car.

The reality is that we can't solve our environmental, transportation, global warming, etc. problems through everyone just buying a hybrid. People will have to give up the personal technologies we have become accustomed and develop new social relationships if we want to move foward and have any measurable imapct on these issues.

Even if the buses are posh and the fares cheap, the buses still share the roads with cars and trucks. That makes them susceptible to delays beyond their control. This issue can be resolved by trains, which use a dedicated right-of-way and suffer far fewer accidents that block their path. Trains also are less sensitive to weather issues. Buses may be great for trips of two hours or less, but otherwise no amount of sprucing up the bus is going to equal rail travel.

Any idea where motorcycles fit in this equation? My motorcycle gets 75mpg. http://www.fuelly.com/driver/sirtofek/rebel

Typical American motorcycles get between 40-60.

Why does Amtrak so much worse than "rail transit" considering IT IS rail transit?

And where is the "carpool with a prius" option?

When I see a city bus during midday, there are often only a few passengers (I don't live in a dense large city), so 1/10 full might be typical. It may be 3/4 full or more during rush hour though. So riding a bus is the best, but only during the times when the busses are full. Otherwise, it is worse than driving an SUV. The same applies to light rail-- off peak has sparse ridership. The transit companies I know of don't publish ridership by hour-- just totals.

Those solo SUV/car numbers, I'm betting they weren't generated using the 14-21 MPG BMW 750ii (car) and 20-27 MPG Honda CR-V (SUV).

Bit of bias in the listing, I'd say. Better to list a couple of personal vehicles with different fuel economy ranges.

George Monbiot's pushed a similar line in his book, arguing that the efficiency edge busses have over most other transport means that a large scale switch to bussing (using the best route designs possible, to keep occupancy optimal) is one of the simplest things we can do to quickly reduce vehicular emissions. But, that most people won't be sold on this without improving the experience of bus travel.

I'm South African, and have used Greyhound quite a lot for intercity travel, and one thing I've heard many times is how much worse American Greyhound travel is than ours [less comfortable seats, worse service, generally no "in-flight" movie to pass the time, stuff like that].
And then there's Turkey...
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/04/21/askthepilot182/
Nothing will make bus trips the most comfortable way to travel, but it's interesting how much difference little improvements could make.

an interesting viewpoint. i do have issues with hank's recommendation - "My environmental innovation for the day would be to posh up the bus system a bit, increase fares by a fraction, and make busses actually comfortable for long-distance travel while still having them be one of the greenest ways to travel."

posh up the buses and increase bus fares so we alter the demographic that travels by bus?

not the problem and not the solution. having traveled by train in different american cities, i see all classes of people in mostly harmonious co-existence.

the real problem with public transportation in our us of a is that it works best with high density housing and most of our country is developed horizontally due to our abundant spaces. a bus system has lower initial cost and hence break-even as compared to trains and so we see more buses than trains.

and i agree with other observations listed above regarding low capacity utilization on buses during off peak hours. a better comparison would provide average daily co2 lbs per passenger mile accounting for load factors.

food for thought - many countries have switched to natural gas or bio diesel fueled buses / cabs / "rickshaws" thereby providing cleaner buses. some of these conversions are extremely inexpensive in $ terms.

Ok, why is a van, used for a vanpool, based on such a heavy vehicle? They use (from Ford) the F-2 or 350 chassis for these little vans. Minivans can carry 7 people with engines that are half the size. Imagine if they used a diesel or hybrid engine with a smaller van!

Let's say the bus system had a fleet of 100, 10-people highly efficient vans. And they could run a system whereby people signup for their route, a program could aggregate similar routes thereby taking 9 cars off the road and saving X amount in CO2 emissions.

Lets not forget that trains, not so long ago, were SERIOUSLY polluting in their steam days.
All technology can be can be improved with the right will and incentives.

In response to the last comment, yes trains were extremely dirty, but the fact that a few monopolistic corporations controlled the railways meant that it was relatively easy to replace the older technology with a newer, cleaner version.

With cars its a different story, there are more cars in America than there are people, there is no efficient way to replace the this old, more heavily polluting fleet of vehicles with a hybrids/plugins.

About 10 million cars are sold in America each year - lets go into the fantasy world here just for the hell of it - and lets assume that every new car is a hybrid and every new car only replaces a car already on the road so that there is no growth in the overall size of the America's fleet. Even taking those logical leaps it still takes over 30 years to fully replace America's current fleet of cars.

Now lets jump back into reality and realize fuel efficient hybrids only make up 2% of the market for NEW cars. Yes that number is going to grow, and should grow pretty quickly, but there will always be that Suburban from the 70's that someone keeps alive because they can't afford to upgrade.

what advanced technology? will buses be sporting new lithium ion batteries or running on natural gas or what?

Rail is very expensive compared with buses. The sweet spot for buses is probably 100 to 400 mile intercity transit. There is no reason why you can't make very comfortable buses - you see many in Europe.

I actually live on the west coast in an area where rail traffic is very heavy and I think I can explain the difference between rail transit and Amtrack. It is not just Amtrack but all commuter lines. Amtrack MUST always give the right of way to commercial rail traffic. Thus, rail transit has a lot less idling time than Amtrack and increases its efficiency. I am not sure that this is what the chart is talking about, but that is my assumption.

I used to take rail transit, commuter rail MARC, each car = 150 in the morning. 200/car in the evening. 50/car? LOL.

Amtrak trains run on diesel fuel while 'rail transit' probably refers to electric commuter trains which are more efficient and can draw from renewable sources?

I really appreciate this graph!

Buses lightly loaded off-peak? Have 2 fleets, one of buses for peak times and one of minibuses for lighter periods. With some clever application of GPS and computers you could even use the minibuses to add capacity during peak hours if you have a particularly busy rush hour. These would push the average pollution output per passenger mile of bus transit way down.

Even if you posh up the buses it would still be hard to attract more people from planes or trains or automobiles, for one particular reason: the time it takes to get to your destination on the bus. If I'm a business traveller, I don't want to have to take an overnight bus both ways and risk sleeping badly and be away from my family for an extra 2 nights. If you can take a day bus *and* you can work on the bus without disturbing the people around you or being disturbed by them then you might be able to make more use of it...

Oh, and Greyhound *are* poshing up some of their business routes, with new buses that have Wifi and power points and more legroom (i.e. more like business class / Eurostar).

Your list is missing one option that solves most of the problems people have with the other options. Oh, and it belongs at the bottom of your graph. www.skytran.net seems to be the best option because it eliminates so much waste (unnecessary trips and stops) and is the cleanest and most efficient option I can see. It would be wonderful to see an update written on this to inform the public!

If this study is going to include buses of varying capacities, then the next one should include Prius driver's (or those driving other hybrids) who go 55mph in a 35mph zone? How environmentally friendly is driving fast in a hybrid vs. me trying to hyper-mile in my Ford Ranger.