Posted Jan 9, 2012, 1:48 AM
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Unicorn Wizard!
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Join Date: Oct 2008
Posts: 4,298
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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.
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