Transportation Infographics

[M II A II R II K]

http://www.delicious.com/stacks/view/Ji7Ytk

[min-chi-cbus]

I'm not understanding the CO2 footprint info.....is it sayng taking an airplane is a SUSTAINABLE way to travel? My understanding was that is was among the most wasteful ways to travel.

[vid]

The total is spread among more people, so per-person it is more fuel efficient than a single person in an SUV. It's the same for the bus. It produces more CO2 than an SUV, but because it has 15 to 45 people on it, that is spread out to the point that it is a smaller amount of CO2 per capita.

[Leo the Dog]

Surprised to see that a bus has a lower footprint than Electric Trains for inner-city travel of 20 miles.

[llamaorama]

It really depends on where they got their data from.

Trains are hardly efficient if nobody is riding them, and buses are even worse when local routes might have only 4 passengers on the bus at any given time. Different countries and cities are going to vary too. Probably in Tokyo, London, NY, etc transit is far more energy efficient on a per-rider basis than elsewhere.

Personally, in the future I think electric cars and mini electric buses would be the most efficient motorized transportation in the majority* of places. Its hard to imagine, outside of a few places like China, high-capacity rail systems being dramatically* extended and actually getting enough use to justify themselves as a green solution. I say "dramatically" because of course it makes sense to build any kind of transit, commuter and urban rail in any city that can make use of it, but if a typical new line in the US gets 50,000 daily riders that's only a fraction of a metropolitan area.