https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
that table is thoroughly fascinating. i mean all of them, there’s more than one table on that article
apparently walking is the most energy-efficient transport mode of all?!?!? apart from bicycles
what i find mind-blowing is that airplanes consume approximately the same amount of energy as cars and trains. I mean i can easily see cars and trains being on the same level, but i always thought that airplanes consumed like an order of magnitude more fuel than cars. considering how everybody keeps saying that “airplanes consume so much fuel” and such. crazy.
and also boats are less efficient than i thought? boats consume 16 L/100 km while cars, trains and airplanes consume 6 L/100 km?
Buses seem to be shafted in that comparison by the fact that no one uses them in the US. Where I am, a bus gets just seven passengers only in the middle of the night. At other times, buses would be easily at the top of the table if not for the fact that our trains also move more than twenty people per car.
Urban sprawl, zoning laws, lack of dedicated bus lanes with safe and walkable stops, low frequency, comfort (seat, space, aircon/heat, chargers), and prices.
Comfort and frequency are the easiest to solve, prices, urban sprawl, zoning laws, and the like less so. Not to mention that labour rights must be improved for bus drivers.
yeah where I am at busses are pacted at rush hour and half full at least throughout the day with a long span around lunch being full again. It also has different size busses for various routes and time based on their metrics. Even has bus trackers so you don’t leave to early from your house waiting in the cold or heat.
That’s because mass transit is, with very few exceptions, absolutely ass in the USA. People only use it as the absolute last resort. That skews the table a lot against any public transit.
That always sounded to me like a chicken-egg problem. People don’t use buses and subways, because buses and subways are populated by weird dirty hobos. Well guess what…
That’s wrong on so many levels I can’t even begin to unpack it.
Oh suuuure. Except maybe you haven’t noticed, but I can read English, and peruse US-dominated social media. In the threads on mass transit it’s always “truly these are complex and multifaceted problems”, and then outside that thread it’s “I had to use subway today with all the masturbating weirdos like a peasant”.
They are just not related. The crazies on the street are not disappearing if people all decide to use transit. How is that a chicken and egg problem?
Explain then how it is that there are no dirty smelly masturbating crazies on buses and subways in my country.
Crazies hang out doing crazy stuff in spaces that are conducive to such behavior. If normal people ride public transport because it’s expected that public transport accommodates normal people, then crazy behavior isn’t tolerated on public transport.
does your country have any social safety nets?
I’m pretty sure that compared to the US, the only relevant social program we have is cops chasing homeless people out of sight, as opposed to letting them hang out wherever.
Aside from universal healthcare, of course.
Easy problem to solve.
Increase the cost of gas to $100 per liter for consumers (exceptions for food delivery, etc) and use the surplus income to build better busses.
Boom. Everyone has excellent public transportation. And everyone uses it.
Your assumption that busses exist so they can be improved is quite telling. Huge swaths of the population, even living in million inhabitants+ cities, simply are not served by any form of mass transit.
The reason public transit works so well in Germany (where I did live for a bit) and Holland (visited and read about) is not because taking a car is more expensive. It’s because mass transit works well, it’s there when you need it, gets you to your destination in reasonable time and comfort, and is easy to use.
The very urban fabric in the USA is car oriented. Every little bodega has to have a dozen parking spaces built by law. Supermarkets have 3 to 4 times their store area wasted in parking lots. Everything is far apart because of this, so walking is impractical. With everyone driving to places, you need wide, fast roads, which makes biking places very unsafe. Every once in a while I see a white painted bike attached to a memorial in a light post, commemorating a life lost. And I live in the suburbs.
It’s not an insurmountable problem, the Netherlands did that in the 70s. But any solution that proposes a simple fix is doomed to failure. This has to be a concerted, intense effort to work.
My approach would be to jack up vehicle registration fees. Simply doubling the vehicle registration cost every year over about 5 years would make individual car ownership expensive enough that people will really try to avoid it.
By the fifth year you’re looking at about $5k per year just to legally own and operate a car on public roads, which is workable (most people pay more than that per year for their car loans) but it’s more than enough to make any family think twice about owning more than one car, and more than enough to make not owning a car and just renting/taking public transit a super attractive option. Plus it’s more than the cost of a mid-range e-bike so trading your car for an ebike becomes extremely cost effective with a break-even point measured in just months
5 years is also enough time to get roads reconfigured for the new traffic flow of mostly ebikes, get more buses in the roads and start planning/building out new train routes. There’s an incredible rail network still in the US and just putting out more passenger services on the existing tracks that are presently freight-exclusive would make a massive difference
Two stroke engines in lawn care motors produce worse pollution than cars.
We need to increase the cost of gas. It’s not just cars.
Maybe it’s the same for commuter rail. It’s weird seeing average 33 passengers, when they were always standing room only while I was riding
Yeah, I’ve lumped them together in my mind, because subway is typically not called ‘train’ in my language. But the situation is about the same. Just looked it up: a subway car here has the ‘full capacity’ of over 300 people, commuter cars around the same, but probably less in practice. And the numbers sure push toward that during rush hour.
I don’t even get the first train line if another is amtrak and another is commuter. is commuter like the chicago metra maybe then light/heavy is a metro?
So the problem is the term “light rail” and “heavy rail” are really technically meaningless. Historically they referred to how physically heavy the actual rails the trains ran on were because freight railroads used a much heavier rail for their mainlines while interurban transit services used cheaper lighter rails because they almost exclusively ran what would now be called an “electric multiple unit” with 1-3 car trains, thereby not requiring more heavy duty rails
Nowadays the actual rail is far from the largest cost and the operational simplicity of using the exact same grade and standards of rail as the freight railroads means they can move their equipment on the freight railroads’ tracks and freight can be moved on their tracks as needed. Because this shift happened to occur during the period of railroad disinvestment in the US nobody really bothered to update the nomenclature so now that we’re reinvesting in rail it completely makes no sense at all
Personally I like to use the terms “interurban” for frequent local services with equipment tuned for commuters that runs between cities (and I mean “cities” from a functional definition not a legal one. Just because Shuamberg is legally a separate city doesn’t mean it isn’t functionally part of Chicago. There really aren’t any remaining interurban services that fit this definition in the US anymore) “commuter rail” for passenger rail service within a sprawling metropolitan area and runs equipment tuned for commuters, “regional rail” for passenger service that goes further than a simple commute or a quick run to the store/museum, has equipment tuned for passengers spending more than an hour on the train. And “long distance rail” for passenger services that are tuned for travel of greater than 300 miles. To me “metro” refers to a grade separated urban rail transit system (so like Chicago’s L or the New York Subway) and “tram/trolley” refers to a ground level urban rail transit system functions like a higher capacity bus, potentially intermixing with car traffic
But this just demonstrates the problem which is that the US has so disinvested in rail transport that there’s no clear, consistent definitions in use anymore so people have to define what they’re talking about every dang time!
yeah see your definitions fit with what I have in my head. the metro compared to tram/trolley which I really just thing of as a bus on rails although I did not really have a good name for the greater city area but I guess commuter makes sense. when it comes to farther I start thinking it like shipping or airtravel when it comes to those long distances. since they are not an everyday or even everyyear type thing I just don’t think of them enough to have a real term for them. Oh man though I went to school downstate and was using a bus system and either they didn’t have any spots left or the place to get it was closed so I picked up an amtrack train and after that it was my first and prefered method to get back and forth from school even though it was a bit pricier. More comfortable and larger seats. Can actually get up and move around. Bathrooms you are not scared to use and a car selling stuff like gas station fare but it had tables which was nice.
I recently took my first Amtrak train (which is funny because I’ve been to countless railroad museums, I’ve been collecting model trains for most of my life, I’ve freaking driven a train, but you know the one thing I didn’t do before this month? Ride Amtrak.
Honestly it was a super wonderful experience that I absolutely want to do again. Even sleeping in the coach seat was way better than I’d expected! And $80 to go halfway across the country is hard to beat!
Maybe, but I’m not familiar with chicagos system
Here in Boston
I think “metros” are a combination of “heavy rail” and “commuter rail” over a larger metro area. Fast and longer distance like commuter rail, but regular service like “heavy rail”
ok yeah then it makes sense. over here you have metra which runs on the same cargo rail as amtrak just more geared around commuting and then we have a metro line so that is like heavy. I think we had light tram type things at times but as far as I know don’t have any currently.
Also the data seems to be from 2018. More than 50% of all new purchased city passenger buses in Europe are zero emission (usually electrified). And that number is higher in some other countries, with China being ahead of everyone.