In downtown Naples I recall seeing a tiny bus; almost looked like “Honey I shrunk the bus”. Practical not only to meet lower demand, but also to navigate the narrower streets. A lot of european transit systems have honor fares rather than paying the driver as you get on. No stamped ticket or pass, big fine. So in this bus, the doors were in the center, almost level with the curb rather than past the driver and over the wheel wells.
I’m in favor of mass transit. I lived in New York for many years and I loved the subways and buses. However, when you’re talking subways, light rail, or even dedicated busways, don’t you have to amortize the BTUs expended in new construction over some initial number of passenger miles? If the energy cost of construction is sufficiently high, at some point it’s probably better to focus on making more efficient cars.
Cars require infrastructure, too - they have to be built, just like buses and trains, and they have to go on roads, etc. Highway maintenance is one of the largest expenditures in any government budget. Look how the feds are able to legislate what should be state laws (drinking age, speed limit) by threatening to withhold highway funds.
But the car infrastructure is built. Both existing roads and newer transit routes would have to be maintained, and I don’t know how to compare those costs, and that is a factor in the calculation. Still you can’t simply compare BTU/passenger mile for existing transport to the isolated operational cost of new transport.
Brad Templeton has some interesting analysis on transportation energy use in his blog: http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html
Brad’s thrust tends to be toward ultra light vehicles and in the future robocars.
I personally have been intrigued by Google’s private bus system. They run their own bus system where they pick up their employees and take them home. The routes and stops are constantly adjusted based on where their employees live. There is a large advantage in only running the bus system during your employees normal commuting times and delivering them to the same point. I live in Orlando and I think such a system could be applied to Walt Disney World or Lockheed-Martin.
As far as electric cars are concerned, I don’t think they are very practical with current lithium-ion battery technology, but if the research into lithium-air is successful, then it could be a whole new ball game. IBM is talking about cars that can drive 500 miles without recharging.
That was an interesting article, and basically addressed all of the comments in this thread (and then some).
While it certainly is interesting to discuss the greeness of various forms of transportation, when it comes to making practical decisions on what form of transportation to use, there are a lot more factors at work than just energy efficiency of the mode of transportation.
I am far more interested in efficiency of getting me from where I am to where I need to be than I am in how much fuel is spent. Sure, I could drive a bus as my personal vehicle, and thereby increase my energy use, but I’m not out to burn energy for energy’s sake. But at the same time, I have other needs that a bicycle or mass transit don’t accommodate.
For instance, I only live about a half mile from my office, but during the work day I may commute on and off site several times, if necessary. That’s another mile or so one way, on a closed facility that requires badged access for the site. So mass transit doesn’t really accommodate me. Similarly, while it might be healthier for me to commute by bike or walk, I am not pleased with the idea of enduring the weather. I live in Houston, where for large parts of the year if I were to walk or ride a bike, I would show up drenched in sweat, and very likely begin to stink throughout the day. This does not convey professionalism, or even consideration for my coworkers.
Also, while my daily commute for work is very short (intentionally so - I bought a house that reduced my travel distance on purpose), I have other activities in the evening after work that travel around the area. That requires timely arrival and carrying several large bags of equipment. I couldn’t do that on mass transit. So a personal vehicle is best suited to those activities, which occur three days a week.
Another consideration is the safety of sharing the road with other vehicles. I have a couple of times ridden a bicycle on busy city streets - it is nerve-wracking and not sane at all. Drivers are inconsiderate, and there is no safety margin for person on a bicycle against a 1/2 ton car, nevermind a 2 ton truck. Or larger. Even a scooter or motorcycle is at a distinct disadvantage, and they also entail other hazards (i.e. balance and traction are far more critical). Plus, they do not deal well with weather variations.
Finally, U.S. suburban communties are just not layed out for convenient mass transit. If one wants to invest in large scale remodeling of lifestyles, then looking at integrating mass transit within a community accommodating that is reasonable, but if we expect to live in the communities we currently have, then it is important that transportation choices reflect the realities of those communities. More efficient personal vehicles is the best use of investment dollars.
I don’t think working hours at WDW are consistent enough for this to be feasible, but I could be wrong.
Powers &8^]
I think a lot of WDW traffic will revolve around park opening and closing times. Hotel and restaurant shift changes will be spread out during the day, but if anything that will let them get better use out of the capitol equipment by using it for more of the day.
Remember this is a private bus system, that can dynamically adjust the routes based on the demand, so that a bus might follow a different route with different stops on each trip. The cast members would just indicate if they want to ride the bus when they set up their work schedule in the computer. If the system can accommodate them, then they would get an email with pick up times.
Also remember that WDW has 65,000 employees, so they don’t need to carry everybody to get a lot of cars off the road. They are building a 1.2 billion dollar light rail system for Orlando that is projecting 7,400 passenger trip by 2030. If you assume that most people will use the system both ways, then that is 3,700 people a day.
I don’t see why a WDW bus system couldn’t easily handle 10,000 people a day for a small fraction of the cost.
Current population estimates call for the U.S. population to increase by about 1% or 3,000,000 people per year through 2050.
Find a way to get those people into cities rather than spread out in suburbs and the rest of the discussion becomes almost irrelevant. Add another 120,000,000 people to the sprawl without concentrating them and almost nothing will help.
I think you’re missing the point a little. Mass transit is very efficient during rush hour, and not very efficient outside of rush hour. How does adding another 3,000,000 people change that equation?
Both articles rely on data pulled directly from the Transportation Energy Data Book, such as the BTU per passenger-mile by mode. A caution is printed above the tables of energy intensity that this key data was extracted from that reads:
“Great care should be taken when comparing modal energy intensity data among modes. Because of the inherent differences among the transportation modes in the nature of services, routes available, and many additional factors, it is not possible to obtain truly comparable national energy intensities among modes. These values are averages, and there is a great deal of variability even within a mode.”
There is a good reason for that warning, yet both authors chose to ignore it and directly compare energy intensity between modes without further analysis. I pointed out one shortcoming of the analysis, that is, in comparing all trips by automobile against transit trips, and not just trips that are truly competitive, where people will directly choose between one mode or the other.
This type of apples-oranges comparison renders the conclusions of both articles not only suspect, but probably invalid.
The distribution of population is crucial for efficiency of mass transit. The current problems with mass transit are due directly to the dispersal of population in a large area, as I said in a previous post.
Part of the reason is that land prices, and therefore home prices, lessen the farther from a central city you get. If the next 100,000,000 people follow this pattern then no form of mass transit can be efficient.
In many older northeastern cities, however, central cities and inner ring suburbs have incredibly cheap houses. If more people buy into those then potential customers for mass transit go up and need for service increases all day long.
The dispersal pattern of population growth will determine usage of mass transit and usage determines efficiency.
Avoiding speculation is one thing, but the percentage of capacity that your efficiency figures are based on is a key missing piece of information.
Your quote about walking and biking is: “(If all else fails, you can just walk or ride your bike.)” That doesn’t sound like it was about allowing shorter trips, which was my point - it sounds like it’s about having these modes as emergency backup options, so I don’t see how I misunderstood you point at all.
Clearly I’m not the only reader who thought this your article answered the question it was based on too narrowly, and thus gave an inaccurate representation of the situation. As another responder said, saying transit is not that inefficient but not mentioning that it is currently greatly underused just perpetuates the problem.
I think you’re using a slightly different definition of “efficiency”.
If you’re talking about overall energy used in commuting (which is probably the most important measure), then of course shorter distances use less overall energy.
But if you’re talking about energy used per passenger mile (which is what Cecil’s article is specifically referring to), then commuter rail and heavy rail/subways perform about the same (at least according to the graph in Templeton’s blog post), so suburb commuting and urban core commuting would be equally efficient in that respect. And using the energy per passenger mile measure, doubling the amount of people using mass transit during rush hour certainly wouldn’t double efficiency (because that wouldn’t address the issue of empty trains running during non-peak periods).
I found this statement particularly misleading:
“2. Trains are efficient, but not that efficient. If you’ve ever been packed into a subway car at rush hour, you might think it’d beat auto efficiency by 10 to 1. Uh-uh — rail travel is a modest 30 percent more efficient than autos on average.”
In fact, a packed subway train during rush hour (in Toronto, a subway train during rush hour could easily carry 200 people) probably is ten times as efficient as an auto. It’s the mostly empty return train that’s inefficient.
I think some of the reason cars perform about as well as transit can be boiled down to this: a car is only using energy when the driver wants to move. Transit, however, is always using energy, even if nobody’s using it (e.g. the example of the empty return train or a bus at off-hours).
I also think there’s less financial pressure on public transit to be energy efficient.
I do not believe that Cecil has taken into account the inefficiencies in the electricial distribution system when calculating the energy required to move a person via electic train. For example, the electricity used to run light rail comes from a power plant. In order to make the electricity some other form of energy must be used. Power generators whether they are hydro electric or nuclear or coal are at best 50% efficient. Add to that the distribution losses and the net energy required to be generated to power the mass transit elctric train could be 3 times what it actually uses. Now take a car, a bus or a diesel locomotive, the energy input is exactly what it takes. Perhaps Cecils PE did take this into account but I do not think so.
The factor of three conversion is correct, but electric cars still do very well because the engines are very efficient and they don’t need to idle. The most efficient electric car I know of is the Aptera, which claims 80 Wh/mi at 55 MPH. Even after you multiply by 3, that works out to 820 BTU per passenger mile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_Motors#Aptera_2_Series
You should also keep in mind that not all BTUs are created equal. Electricity can be generated Nuclear and Hydroelectric, which don’t generate greenhouse gases or coal and natural gas, which don’t require imported fuels.
Are you claiming that the internal combustion engine is 100% efficient? 'Cause that’s totally batshit insane.
Yes.