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?
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.
universal healthcare is pretty much the most significant socail safety there is.
Ok so you don’t know what you’re talking about in the slightest lol
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.