Rail Transit Contributes to Global Warming

Update: Fixed links to paper.

Most light-rail lines use as much or more energy per passenger mile as an average SUV, and many emit more pounds of CO2 per passenger mile than the average automobile. Moreover, the energy efficiency and CO2 emissions of automobiles are steadily improving, while the energy efficiency of both bus and rail transit are declining. Thus, cities that want to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions would do better to encourage auto drivers to buy more fuel-efficient cars than to build rail transit lines.

Those are the main conclusions of the Antiplanner’s new Cato paper, “Does Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” While some rail transit operations are energy and CO2 efficient, the energy and CO2 costs of construction overwhelm any savings. Thus, from an environmental viewpoint, rail transit is almost always a bad investment.

Drug Interactions with Alpha Blockers Males taking erectile dysfunction medications (like Vigara, samples viagra) are not suggested to anyone. Walnut: Take a few fresh leaves of the coca plant and is an extremely powerful stimulant for generic cialis professional the nervous system to act immediately in achieving erection. Doctor Ron focuses on a combined partnership with parents to ensure a positive sildenafil online uk outcome for the children. Although ED is a more common condition in older men, mostly comprising men with hypertension. canadian viagra pills navigate here Longtime readers of the Antiplanner will recognize that this paper is based on blog posts from last August. The paper corrects some errors pointed out by faithful readers, most importantly by accurately accounting for the CO2 emissions from local sources of energy. The paper also points out several ways of reducing CO2 emissions that are far more cost effective than even the best rail lines.

Curiously, after I was done writing the Cato report, I discovered that UC Irvine economist Charles Lave said almost exactly the same thing way back in 1979. Public transportation is not particularly energy efficient, he wrote, and spending huge sums of money on transit will not attract many people out of their cars. If we want to save energy, he concluded, it makes more sense to encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars than to invest in transit.

Since Lave wrote, the average energy efficiency of both passenger cars and light trucks has increased, a response to high fuel prices. Meanwhile, the average energy efficiency of both buses and rail transit have declined, probably because the transit industry has extended both bus and rail service to areas where they are little used. So what Lave wrote in 1979 is now more true than ever.

Yet many people still believe the myth that spending a lot of money on transit will save energy. This shows how hard it is to kill such misconceptions, especially when they are promoted by a wealthy lobby and supported by many planners decades after economists like Lave have disproven them.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

39 Responses to Rail Transit Contributes to Global Warming

  1. D4P says:

    Most light-rail lines use as much or more energy per passenger mile as an average SUV, and many emit more pounds of CO2 per passenger mile than the average automobile

    Yet, in your very own Table 1, you show that “Passenger Cars” emit MORE CO2 per passenger mile than “Light Rail”.

    While some rail transit operations are energy and CO2 efficient, the energy and CO2 costs of construction overwhelm any savings

    What does the Antiplanner mean when he says “some rail transit operations are energy and CO2 efficient”? Given the point of his post, he seems to have just slipped this in, hoping it would get lost and overlooked.

  2. craig says:

    D4P said:

    What does the Antiplanner mean when he says “some rail transit operations are energy and CO2 efficient”

    I guess you have to read it again, the energy and CO2 costs of construction overwhelm any savings.

    If you don’t count the building of the rail line some lines would be efficient.

    That would be like only charging Transit users for the operation cost and not for the construction, train, buses and all the cost of transit.

  3. bennett says:

    Craig, It’ seems that Randal has used one of his famous double standards. The energy and CO2 costs of road construction are insanely high. I wonder what emits more, the construction of 1 mile of light rail or the construction of 1 mile of road? I don’t know, but would assume they are at least comparable, if road construction is not higher.

  4. msetty says:

    One study by quite credible researchers has modeled the relationships between transit and vehicle usage using “Structural Equation Models” which are the same type of math used to examination causation in a number of fields such as genetics, marketing, etc. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_equation_modeling. They found that transit reduces daily household travel by up to 10.9 daily VMT for households near rail stops generally within 0.75 mile; for buses, daily household VMT was reduced by 3.3 near bus stops, and generally under 0.25 mile. On an overall basis, for every passenger mile on transit, slightly more than two daily personal vehicle VMTs were supressed.

    The report is located at http://www.apta.com/research/info/online/land_use.cfm. Just because this study was commissioned by APTA doesn’t mean it should automatically be; the veracity of the work itself is what is important here. If it holds up–and I think the credibility of the authors are impeccable and the mathematical method has been used many times to make multibillion dollar business decisions–this is an extremely important piece of research essentially blowing Randal’s work out of the water.

  5. aynrandgirl says:

    It blows nothing out of the water. Transit reduces VMT, not because transit is good, but because it’s a time-wasting pain in the *** to use. That’s entirely aside from the freedom personal transportation creates, which merits paying a high cost (not that transit’s costs are less; they aren’t). This is all predicated on reducing VMT being ipso facto desirable which, since “global warming” is a fraud and a scam, does not follow.

  6. D4P says:

    “global warming” is a fraud and a scam

    What are the goals of the people who are allegedly perpetrating the scam?

  7. Builder says:

    (Research)Money and Power.

  8. D4P says:

    Power for what purpose?

  9. D4P says:

    BTW: I’m assuming there’s plenty of research money for folks trying to convince others that climate change is a scam.

  10. prk166 says:

    d4p —> The goal? I’m not sure they have a conscious goal. After all, did Chicken Little really have a goal? What is Al Gore’s goal? To save the planet based off some improbable outcomes? If he’s worried about the worst case scenario why not worry about an ice age. That may sound daft but at this point if we’re going to take extreme measures based on improbable outcomes, we absolutely should plan for an ice age. That will cause way more destruction than anything global warming can heep on us during the next century or two.

    msetty —> I don’t get the importance of it that study. It’s seems pretty obvious that most people living within a 1/4 mile of a bus stop will drive less and within 3/4 of a mile of an LRT station will drive less. Not because those things cause them to so but because of where they tend to be located; that is correlation.

    Think about it. Where are most bus stops? They’re in the inner city. When not there they’re in the old inner ring suburbs. If you go out to some new suburban city, chances are they have a circulator or three and a couple park and rides. So you’ve got a city of let’s say 60,000 where maybe a couple thousand live within a 1/4 mile of those park and rides. But you go into the inner city where you still have a ton of poor + elderly – the reasons for public transit – and most everyone fits that. Plus you’ve got other things helping out. A lot of well off people live in the city and work downtown; the 20 minute bus ride is cheaper and just as easy as driving. I’d imagine all the junior high and high school students taking public transit instead of school buses help skew those numbers too.

    It’s practical for me to take the bus to LoDo to drink when I live 1 – 2 miles from downtown. But stick me out 15-20 miles in the burbs and even if that stop were 1/4 mil away, it’s still not a practical. That bus ride downtown is a lot less convenient. Chances are I’ll skip and just go out locally. The same with work. Why not just find a new job in the area I live instead of making the long commute downtown?

    Seems more like a study that proves correlation rather than causation.

  11. D4P says:

    The goal? I’m not sure they have a conscious goal

    So there’s no fiendish agenda behind it all? They’re just doing it for fun?

  12. Dan says:

    That would be like only charging Transit users for the operation cost and not for the construction, train, buses and all the cost of transit.

    Non-state and federal roads are, again, often paid for and maintained through the general fund. The street in front of your house is very likely repaved via general fund.

    Holding transit users to all costs as a policy option needs also to have the same option on the table for auto users.

    That is: many of the roads you drive on – EVERY DAY – are not completely paid for via gas & license taxes. This is the reason why you see transportation bonds on the ballot every year.

    DS

  13. John Dewey says:

    bennett: “Craig, It’ seems that Randal has used one of his famous double standards. The energy and CO2 costs of road construction are insanely high. I wonder what emits more, the construction of 1 mile of light rail or the construction of 1 mile of road?”

    Bennett, did you read Mr. O’Toole’s paper? He explained that your “insanely high” road construction energy and CO2 costs are spread across many, many more passenger miles than are the construction energy and CO2 costs of light rail lines. In addition, those energy and CO2 of roads can also be allocated to the ton miles of freight that trucks carry across those roads. When the energy and CO2 costs of road and rail construction are properly allocated to the people who actually use each mode, roads come out way ahead.

    If you had read Mr. O’Toole’s paper you would have also discovered that energy and CO2 costs of light rail construction will not be offset by savings of vehicle passenger miles for 172 years. As light rail lines have an effective life of less than half that long, there is no way that light rail construction can ever be energy and CO2 efficient – and that assumes that vehicle fuel efficiency will not increase. New CAFE standards blow that assumption out of the water, of course.

    Bottom line: light rail projects increase energy and CO2 consumption. Light rail is exactly the opposite of environmentally friendly.

  14. Dan says:

    since “global warming” is a fraud and a scam,

    To 4% of the population. The vast majority of the planet has moved on and is looking for ways to adapt and mitigate.

    Just saying. You may not want to use that line in a job interview or anything.

    DS

  15. John Dewey says:

    Dan: “Holding transit users to all costs as a policy option needs also to have the same option on the table for auto users. ”

    The problem with doing so is that roads would be present even if 100% of commuters used trains. Streets and roads are required for emergency vehicle access, for product deliveries, for school buses, etc. When streetcars delivered people to suburbs – in the pre-automobile days – roads were already everywhere that houses existed.

    The idea that rail transit should be exempt from any street construction and maintenance fees allocated to personal vehicles ignores the simple use of streets by users of both modes. Rail can never reach every house of the 150 million people who commute in our large cities. Streets are necessary, but rail is not.

    The argument that vehicle drivers do not pay for their roads is just silly. The street in front of my suburban home was paid for by the developer of my subdivision – who passed on that cost to me through the price of my home. The maintenance of the road in front of my house is paid by me through the municipal property taxes I pay.

    On the other hand, light rail in Dallas – used by a mere 30,000 people each day – is paid for from sales taxes paid by all 4 million residents of Dallas County and its adjacent suburbs.

  16. Dan says:

    The problem with doing so is that roads would be present even if 100% of commuters used trains. Streets and roads are required for emergency vehicle access, for product deliveries, for school buses, etc.

    You miss my point. You’ll have to have the schools hold a bake sale to have the kiddies pay full freight on their user fees, as the scheme to pay full freight for rail must extend to all transport. Ambulance fees too.

    DS

  17. John Dewey says:

    Dan: “You miss my point. You’ll have to have the schools hold a bake sale to have the kiddies pay full freight on their user fees, as the scheme to pay full freight for rail must extend to all transport. Ambulance fees too. ”

    Well, I have no idea what you are talking about right now – especially the silly comments about “kiddies” and “bake sales” so it’s entirely possible that I have missed your previous point, whatever it was.

    See if you can get this point: I’m sick and tired of paying hundreds of dollars in sales and gasoline taxes each year for light rail systems that benefit only a tiny fraction of commuters. Despite light rail’s continued failure to attract ridership, socialist liberals and collectivist “planners” continue to petition elected officials to fund it.

  18. aynrandgirl says:

    BTW: I’m assuming there’s plenty of research money for folks trying to convince others that climate change is a scam.

    Do tell. Where might I obtain such money, and how does it compare in dollars (and free publicity from our politically-correct media) to the dollars available to convince us our way of life is doomed?

    Power for what purpose?

    To force others to live the “right” way. It’s another way to conspicuously display your virtue.

  19. aynrandgirl says:

    You may not want to use that line in a job interview or anything.

    I’ll have to remember that (snicker!).

    That is: many of the roads you drive on – EVERY DAY – are not completely paid for via gas & license taxes.

    What happened to sales and income taxes? I’ll bet the sales and income taxes on auto-related sales, parts, and services amount to a heck of a lot of money. Do the studies purporting to measure the subsidy received by roads include these? Do they account for the diversion of auto-related taxes away from roads into transit and the general fund? If not, they’re outright frauds.

  20. Francis King says:

    I largely agree with Antiplanner’s take on this problem. In the UK, a diesel inter-city train does 90mpg per person, a modern diesel car does 60mpg – so two people going to a meeting would use less fuel by going by car. Antiplanner’s take on traffic lights is also good to see. Congestion is about a mismatch between demand AND supply. A lot of congestion appears to be caused by very badly designed junctions.

    There are ways of making transit use less energy and cost less, though. One is to run light rail and rail-buses along existing track, such as was done in Manchester UK, and elsewhere. The track costs nothing, is often already segrgated from the other traffic, and offers a high quality of service for very little investment. It is obvious that most railways are run sparsely, with a lot of unused capacity, and there is considerable slack for running new services.

    Another way is to use bicycles to link the location to the transit. This greatly increases the area available to transit, and, by enabling the stops to be moved further apart, increases transit speed. Car journeys tend to consist of three parts – getting to the freeway (a short distance), moving along the freeway, with all the other cars (a long distance) and then getting to the destination (a short distance). Likewise – cycling to the transit stop (a short distance), travelling by coach along the freeway (a long distance) and then cycling to the destination (a short distance). Antiplanner doesn’t have bicycles on his graph, but the x-axis will do just fine instead.

  21. Francis King says:

    I’d also like to say something about global warming.

    1). It’s real. Human beings are releasing carbon into the environment that hasn’t seen the light of day since before the dinosaurs. The amount being released is small compared to the size of the natural carbon cycle, but it accumulates, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, decade by decade. Hence the fact that so many reputable scientists are getting hot under the collar about it. Something for the deniers to think about…

    2) … something for the climate change evangelists too. The rate of temperature change is about 2 degrees centigrade over 100 years, but we manage just fine with bigger natural variations from year to year – so hardly the end of the world. The 2 degrees centigrade is based on prediction of what the future will hold – unless crystal balls have improved in quality since my youth, that’s a bit of a lost cause. The IPCC has dealt with this by creating a whole series of scenarios, but then which scenario is correct? The environmentalists always pick the biggest rise, without justification (perhaps their crystal ball works better). I also have not seen the formula or graph which says that today’s temperature is the best one we can have – there is some evidence that the majority of the earth’s population could use a slight temperature increase.

    3) Usually, when an action is being evaluated, the costs and benefits are compared. With the polarisation of the debate about global warming, this isn’t happening. Either a) CO2 emissions have no cost, the action is purely beneficial or b) the action has no benefit, the CO2 emissions are purely detrimental. There are many African peasant today who are photogenically poor, but who have no access to mechanisation. They could use a tractor more than the usual charity nonsense, despite the increase in CO2 emissions caused thereby.

  22. D4P says:

    Do tell. Where might I obtain such money

    Big Oil. They don’t like the idea of people buying less gasoline.

  23. John Dewey says:

    Francis King: “There are ways of making transit use less energy and cost less, though. One is to run light rail and rail-buses along existing track, such as was done in Manchester UK, and elsewhere.”

    In post-automobile cities – such as Dallas and Phoenix – existing rail lines are far from most employment destinations. That’s because few modern employers build near dirty, smelly rail lines. Investing hundreds of millions in commuter rail – rather than billions in light rail – results in even fewer train commuters. The high employment destinations are taken out of the picture.

    Francis King: “Another way is to use bicycles to link the location to the transit.”

    Not sure if you have ever been to the large U.S. sunbelt cities such as Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. These are the high growth cities where jobs have been migrating for the past 20 years. Bicycling from May through October in any of these cities would require a shower immediately after. It’s just not an oprtion for any white collar or service worker.

    Francis King: “Car journeys tend to consist of three parts – getting to the freeway (a short distance), moving along the freeway, with all the other cars (a long distance) and then getting to the destination (a short distance).”

    That was true 30 years ago, and still true for some workers today. But U.S. metropolitan areas are geographically dispersed now, and getting more so. Commuting often means just driving a few miles along an arterial road to the suburban job location. It can also mean exiting a freeway and driving 5 or more miles to a non-freeway job location. In some cases, the commute requires driving along one freeway for 6 miles and then switching to another in a second direction. In this last case, using trains for the commute would require a time-consuming transfer.

    What has changed dramatically in the urban landscape is the obselescence of the suburb to central business district hub-and-spoke model. Modern telecommunications – especially the internet – have made it no longer necessary for businesses to be located close to each other. Yet planners continue to promote hub-and-spoke rail solutions for a problem that left them long ago.

  24. Dan says:

    See if you can get this point: I’m sick and tired of paying hundreds of dollars in sales and gasoline taxes each year for light rail systems that benefit only a tiny fraction of commuters. Despite light rail’s continued failure to attract ridership, socialist liberals and collectivist “planners” continue to petition elected officials to fund it.

    Your focus-grouped fear phrases such as socialist and collectivist tip your hand, lad. They are also self-marginalizing phrases that cause decision-makers to tune out.

    Nonetheless, you want to wish that all roads are paid for entirely by user fees. This is false, as you yourself point out in your ineffective anecdote.

    First, just because YOUR developer paid for the road doesn’t mean ALL developers paid for local access roads in this country. News flash: they didn’t and don’t. The majority of incorporated municipalities fund transportation infra repair out of the general fund; this was a real problem at my last place and only somewhat less so here, although wait a year or two and we’ll see how big the potholes get. See, the general fund is paid into by all citizens, including the elderly who don’t drive and the kiddies’ candy purchase taxes. So, I guess the folks who don’t drive are sick and tired of paying hundreds of dollars in sales and property taxes for roads they don’t use. I’m wondering if taking candy from kids to pay for roads is ducky for everyone. And I’m sure the folks without kids are sick and tired of paying hundreds of dollars in property taxes to schools that only benefit a tiny fraction of future consumers. Gosh! I guess we’ll have to dismantle society just so a few don’t have to pay taxes. Sure.

    Second, unless the road in front of your house is private, it will be repaved by your town. Out of everyone’s property tax, even if they don’t use the road in front of your house. Out of monies from the general fund, unless somehow your town has a fantastically progressive taxing mechanism that is able to distinguish types of revenue and pay into transportation accounts. I doubt it. So, to be consistent, you have to match your objection to rail subsidies with your objection to road subsidies, because the road in front of your house is subsidized by taxpayers who don’t use your road, and have a decent chance of not even driving (the young and the elderly).

    So, buff up your ideological talking points and bring them in line with reality.

    DS

  25. msetty says:

    Grok this link, folks.

    COMBINED, with the earlier link to that study documenting the reduced 102 billion annual VMT due to the existing half-baked transit system we currently have in the U.S., e.g., http://www.apta.com/research/info/online/land_use.cfm,

    COMBINED with the fact that the Calgary C-Train LRT as a practical matter currently has ZERO carbon emissions and ZERO net energy usage because 100% of the power comes from wind farms on the Alberta prairie (http://www.calgarytransit.com/environment/ride_d_wind.html,
    (OK, OK, they still have to amortize the construction costs; doh! Randal!)

    And COMBINED with so-called “flow batteries” that can even out the intermittent power from windmills and solar cells which should be economic in the next few years…

    I’d say Randal’s study and the entire anti-rail movement–such as it is–will soon be an interesting footnote to history.

  26. Ettinger says:

    Well,

    Does anyone here think, realistically, that there will ever be a time when the amount of oil produced in the world will be reduced because there are not enough users who could use (read burn) the oil that is extracted?

    The very fact that billions of users are lining up to buy oil at $100 a barrell tells me that this point will never come.

    So, in that respect, any attempt to mastermind a top down reduction of transportation CO2 seems a futile waste of human energy in terms of reducing total CO2 production from all sources. The only final effect of any eventual oil savings in transportation, would be to reduce the price of oil until the oil starts getting used somewhere else. So, in the end, the equation:

    Total Oil Burned = Total oil that comes out of the earth.

    Will always hold.

    So, essentially, I just can never see a point coming where the Saudis, or any other oil producing nation says “Geez! we better reduce oil production because we just don’t seem to be able to find anybody that wants it”.

    If treaties like, say, the famous Kyoto protocol ever reduced oil consumption, then the oil saved is now burned in other uses since total oil production remains the same (actually keeps increasing slightly seems). As I said:

    Total Oil Burned = Total oil that comes out of the earth.

    No matter how you shuffle the deck.

  27. msetty says:

    Ettinger:

    If the burn rate was reduced substantially, the life of available oil would be lengthened by decades, if not a century or more. Same principle goes with coal. One of the points of my previous posts was that renewable electricity, e.g., windmills combined with “flow batteries” are not that far off from being cost competitive with coal-burning, if not already so. This most certainly is also true of thin-film solar cells, if the “$0.99 per watt” claims of these guys is confirmed.

    One sign of “peak oil” may be that the Saudi king has essentially said that they won’t increase production higher than 9 million barrels per day, though the Saudis claim they could pump 11 million barrels daily right now, and could up capacity to 12.5 million barrels within a few years. Actually I think this means either (1) they CAN’T actually increase production without threatening the future integrity of their oil fields, and/or (2) they are looking ahead and have decided to limit production to provide for their own dramatically growing internal needs while also lengthening the time that they can be selling oil. See the April 13th threads at http://www.theoildrum.com for a lot more on this.

    Someone, I forgot who, said a long time ago that oil was far too valuable to burn, e.g., in the long term, over centuries, its real value is as feedstock for the chemical industry and as lubricants. Though motorheads everywhere in the U.S. would violently disagree, the Saudis, Chavez, etc. may be doing us a favor by refusing to meet the short term demands of the U.S. for under $3.00 gasoline, thus hopefully forcing us to get serious about alternatives such as the wind, solar cell, and industrial-scale electricity storage, as well as some more nukes.

  28. msetty says:

    Also a clarification:

    From various forms of renewables, e.g., windmills and solar cells, the new net energy being released is effectively ZERO because (1) the wind is blowing anyway, and (2) the sun is also shining anyway. The only issue is efficient use of the capital investments involved. There is also no new net release of energy with hydroelectric, too, because water will still run downhill whether we capture it or not. Therefore Randal’s claim that “as much or more energy” is being used by hydro-powered rail transit than by automobiles is literally meaningless.

    By the logic Randal has shown, since windmills may be only, say 20% efficient at capturing the wind that is occurring anyway, then the Calgary C-Train is actually five times less efficient than they claim…but REALLY the only thing we care about is the efficiency of the capital investment needed to capture the electricity in the first place…

  29. Francis King says:

    [24] John Dewey said: “Not sure if you have ever been to the large U.S. sunbelt cities such as Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. These are the high growth cities where jobs have been migrating for the past 20 years. Bicycling from May through October in any of these cities would require a shower immediately after. It’s just not an oprtion for any white collar or service worker.”

    http://www.egovehicles.com/

    The USA has a wide variety of climates, just like Europe, and each area will need to find its own way forwards.

    “That was true 30 years ago, and still true for some workers today. But U.S. metropolitan areas are geographically dispersed now, and getting more so. Commuting often means just driving a few miles along an arterial road to the suburban job location. It can also mean exiting a freeway and driving 5 or more miles to a non-freeway job location. In some cases, the commute requires driving along one freeway for 6 miles and then switching to another in a second direction. In this last case, using trains for the commute would require a time-consuming transfer.

    What has changed dramatically in the urban landscape is the obselescence of the suburb to central business district hub-and-spoke model. Modern telecommunications – especially the internet – have made it no longer necessary for businesses to be located close to each other. Yet planners continue to promote hub-and-spoke rail solutions for a problem that left them long ago”

    The hub doesn’t have to coincide with a CBD – it’s just that it does in the smaller UK cities. One or more hubs just need to be sufficiently close that the second-tier transport, providing the last-mile journey, can easily get to the nearest hub, from all urban areas. Travelling around arterial roads close to a hub is easy, because the second-tier transport can do this (it’s private transport, like a car). Travelling over a grid pattern of hubs takes one transfer, maximum. This can be nice or unpleasant, depending on how it’s organised (usually, badly).

    The failure of previous hub & spoke approaches (bus, LRT) is that the second-tier transport is walking, which limits the access to 400m in the case of buses, and leads to close spacings. The whole edifice can quickly become so inferior to the service provided by cars, that people would prefer to pay the higher costs of cars (congestion and financial) instead. By contrast, Latin American countries have pioneered BRT, with stations affording secure cycle parking.

  30. Dan says:

    These are the high growth cities where jobs have been migrating for the past 20 years. Bicycling from May through October in any of these cities would require a shower immediately after. It’s just not an oprtion for any white collar or service worker.

    It was an option for a large number of us in Sacramento. See, the companies provided showers. 14 miles one way, minimum 3 days a week. Our locker bank in the bathroom had to be enlarged due to the demand.

    Yes, in auto-culture Sacto where we had to endure the brave morons buzzing us and honking and screaming, daily. Many a morning’s highlight was the red light at the bottom of the bridge, where the moment-ago brave wouldn’t look at me.

    DS

  31. John Dewey says:

    Dan: “It was an option for a large number of us in Sacramento”

    It has been 20 years since I lived and worked in Sacramento. Perhaps the city has changed, but the number of cyclists as a percentage of all commuters was minicule. Do you have any data that shows otherwise?

    Large companies do provide a few showers in their modern office buildings, but hardly enough to accomodate more than a tiny fraction of workers. Small employers rarely provide showers for workers. Such small employers have neither the demand for showers nor the resources to provide them.

  32. John Dewey says:

    Francis King: “The USA has a wide variety of climates, just like Europe, and each area will need to find its own way forwards.”

    There are a few U.S. cities where walking and bicycling are conceivable in both winter and summer months. But those modes are just not feasible for at least 90 percent of the U.S. urban population – and that includes almost all the large growing cities.

    Chicago metro commuters may be able to walk and cycle in the spring and fall, but most will not do so in 0 degree Fahrenheit winters and 95 degree Fahrenheit summers. The same ios true for Denver and Omaha and St. Louis anmd Memphis and just about every major city not on an ocean. Commuters in seaside cities in the south may not have to endure freezing winters, but the heat and humidity for half the year will prohibit human-powered transport.

    Commuting solutions have to meet the full year needs of commuters. It makes no sense to invest in a combination mass transit, human-powered transit system in a city that can only utilize it half the year. Yet that’s what planners in many large cities continue to propose.

  33. Dan says:

    John (33):

    your argument was:

    It’s just not an option for any white collar or service worker.

    It is, in fact, an option.

    HTH,

    DS

  34. the highwayman says:

    This still hasn’t changed the fact that the bulk of O’Toole’s “work” is based on a false premises and is more along the lines of a witch hunt or some one chasing windmills.

  35. Pingback: Responsible Transportation Forum » The “Green” Transportation Debate- Buses, Light Rail, Hybrid Cars, PRT?

  36. NPWeditor says:

    RE: Peak Oil

    Peak oil rests on the theory of biotic genesis of petroleum. What if oil is abiotic in origin? That is to say, what if it didn’t come from “dinosaurs” or “fossils”? Sound far fetched? Russians geologists hold to the abiogenic hypothesis of petroleum origin, and their oil production has increased over the years. They’ve even found 17,000 feet deep in volcanic rock. More at:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

    and Confessions of an “ex” Peak Oil Believer:

    http://tinyurl.com/ywuc5e

    The point? What if petrleum is generated in the mantle and the suppy is not finite? Something to consider.

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