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?
oh come off it, it’s a great way to provide service in areas that are NEVER going to get proper bus lines otherwise.
We use it in most of sweden (as a fallback in rural areas) and it’s perfectly functional.
Oh yeah it makes perfect sense for very small towns and rural areas, but when a city with a population measured in the hundreds of thousands seriously tries to run a demand response transit system as literally it’s entire transit system, it deserves more than this level of derision
right, but maybe americans can try to remember that actual rural areas (as in, something between the density of suburbia and wyoming) do exist, and that the entire world doesn’t consist of 30 megacities in a desert? It’s very frustrating to see perfectly valid modes of transport dismissed as bonkers and inefficient, when it demonstrably works okay in the right circumstances and enables 90% of my country to have any sort of public transport at all.
I see this kind of thing so often from americans, taking their personal experiences with public transport and their local conditions, and projecting that upon the entire concept of public transport as a whole.
Everything from “public transport is full of stinky druggies and is only for the truly desperate”, to “the only form of public transport that exists is buses; trains and trams are ancient and irrelevant”. And it’s baffling because just looking at how things work in the rest of the world would immediately disabuse those notions.
Hey man, I get the frustration, but your frustration is misplaced. I presently live in a town of ~10k people, married a woman who grew up on a goat farm outside of a town of 700, I work in an unincorporated community of around 400. I just took a big vacation in which I rode about a dozen different transit systems, and I’m already planning the next one. I’m a freaking model railroader and I’ve been looking at potential adding a running model bus system to my model railroad as well.
Trust me I get what you’re saying, I understand the exact frustrations you’ve expressed, I just ask you do the same for me