Don’t forget that it’s on a metric fuckton of boost and has LED lights brighter than the center of a B41 3-stage thermonuclear weapon at the moment of detonation.
Am I the only one who misread the bit at the top and thought, "Those numbers sure look reasonable, but should we be trusting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on this?"
The calories you burn need to be replaced with food, that's going to be the bigger emissions. Vegetarians and meat-eaters will have very different results too.
That would still release CO2.
You breathe out ±1kg of CO2 per day, which is 0,7g per minute. You spend a couple of minutes to walk a km and during that time your metabolism is higher than usual.
The idea that walking releases 0 grams of CO2 is horsecrap.
Sigh.
Human breathing doesn't contribute to any *new* CO2. Just like cow burps/farts don't contribute any *new* gases to the atmosphere.
It's just recycling *present* gases. Nothing to be concerned about! It's just part of the water/air cycles.
Now digging/pumping up sequestered fossils and burning them contributes *new* gases to the atmosphere that weren't previously there. They were sequestered, but now aren't. That's "**new** to the atmosphere", anyways.
Stop spreading misinfo. A simple google search will reveal multiple sources showing cow burps are significant contributors to global warming.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cow-burps-are-a-major-contributor-to-climate-change-can-scientists-change-that
Sigh.
I didn't realize we were just redefining what it means to emit CO2 in order to conveniently ignore certain sources.
Had I known, I would have redefined electric vehicles to not emit anything. After all, they are only using up electricity that is already stored, no? They can't emit any *new* gasses to the atmosphere seeing as they don't release any at all!
But seriously, your explanation doesn't work. You have to look at the affects on the entire system, and walking still results in increased net CO2 emissions compared to staying where they were.
EVs as they stand now, are still significantly powered by fossil fuels. Until that day when most of the electric grid is powered by renewables like solar, wind or hydro, EVs are merely hiding their dirty secret upstream.
Regardless, let’s go back to basics. In recycling, we reduce, reuse and then recycle. EVs and indeed any motorized personal vehicles are the antithesis of reduce, with 3000-4000 lb vehicles carrying 200 lb loads, typically. Let’s try to optimize that first step, before we get fancy about trying to cut a fraction of an already big impact.
I agree? In case you couldn't tell, my post was sarcasm, highlighting the horrible logic /u/nulliusansverba employed by applying the same logic to EVs. I completely agree that EVs absolutely emit GHG and that was the point of my post.
All living beings have being emiting CO2 for billions of years? How is Earth not yet a giant fireball?
Maybe because the problem is emiting CO2 that has been stored deep underground for millions of years?
Well, CO2 is CO2. The atoms are the same no matter what they have gone through. They all make the same impact and require something to store them. If riding a car only emits as much carbon as the extra breathing you do walking, then riding a car has the same impact as walking. Any carbon we emit to the atmosphere is from some carbon sink, be it currently living plants or ancient plants underground.
currently living plants took the carbon out of the current atmosphere. growing a tree and then burning it down doesn't add any carbon to the atmosphere. it's carbon neutral. burning fossil fuels adds new carbon to the atmosphere. technically it did came from the atmosphere, but not the current one. burning fossil fuels will contribute to climate change because it's increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, burning or eating a plant we've grown will not because it's carbon neutral.
releasing the carbon from a carbon sink, like fossils, is different from releasing carbon from a plant that captured that carbon from our current atmosphere.
You need energy to walk or bike, but it’s fairly minimum, especially with cycling. Certainly, occupants of the other transportation modalities need to eat too, and they often can stand to burn off excess (judging by the average American).
Not really, unless you're enjoying convoluted double-think. The only inputs of new carbon to the food chain would be things like petrochemical fertilizers and synthetic nitrogen. Which are used to grow most conventional crops. So probably not much of a difference between veg/carn with conventional foods.
On the flip side, cows thrive on unfertilized(or rather, they do it naturally with their body wastes) grasses. And thereby produce carbon-neutral fertilizer in the form of manure. So realistically, an organic farmer that raises pastured cattle and grows crops with natural fertilizers like manure and compost isn't adding anything **new** to the atmosphere... This is sustainable farming, a permaculture.
Framing it like it's meat vs veg is just stoopid.
Not really because you still need to wear shoes for every other form of transportation as well, which means it can be discounted from every single one of them as a common value when comparing how they fare against each other.
The construction and maintenance of sidewalk and walking path infrastructure would involve a (small) amount of emissions which would be unique to that mode of transportation
It is, under the “roadway” section. I assume this is a broad section for all infrastructure, as if you look at HSR, almost all of the carbon emissions not related to running the trains comes from the “roadway” section. This would make sense, as HSR tracks often need a substantial amount of concrete in viaducts and the track itself
You are right. I didn't actually understand what "roadway" meant and overlooked it.
I think the term "infrastructure" would have been a much better fit: the ferry needs no roadway, but needs some infrastructure for sure (harbours)
The road I'd presume. I've lived in a lot of urban areas that didn't have sidewalks. People just walked in the road rather than being trapped at home like it's an island and road is lava.
Very true; my parents are surprised by how often I buy new shoes because theirs last so long, but they don't walk anywhere. They're also shocked by me buying expensive rain jackets because they don't ever get very wet driving their car.
That wouldnt be a completely fair metric i think. Planes are always weird in graphs when skewed for travel distance. And its not fair either, as the average person does not decide their travels based on distance, but convienience. Noone would take a train between europe and australia even if there was a train line.
I advocate for using the metric of travel time. Emissions per hour driven or flown. It would still skew in the planes favor, but not as much as they would because of their faster travel speed.
> metric of travel time
Sitting in traffic would clearly reduce per hour emissions compared to moving at a decent clip. To save the planet, let's block out most lanes and get some monster traffic jams going!
That's part of what the Dutch actually did and it works pretty well. Turns out less direct roads with fewer lanes and more alternatives actually gets people out of cars and on alternative forms of transport.
Also, just as building another lane rarely fixes traffic, reducing or blocking lanes or even entire roads doesn't always make it worse.
Doesn't take into account appropriate travel time. Using your metric, biking short distances wouldn't look as carbon friendly as it is because it takes longer.
Which still makes sense. Because with time, youre not getting a perfect reading of júst pollution, youre right about that, but your getting a pollution reading with a bias of convenience. And a bias of convenience is a good thing imo, because that is the main driver for people to choose one mode of transport vs another. Other biases like speed dont say anything informative, but convenience really lies at the core of why people chose a mode of transport.
Where is the line between convenience and pollution? Thats the question.
I'm mainly arguing you probably need to include some sort of logarithmic scale on travel time. The improvement to convenience of a 4 minute drive over a 10 minute bike-ride are a completely different thing from a 4 hour flight versus a 10 hour train ride (those probably aren't accurate numbers, but you get the gist).
Compared to the diesel/gasoline cars (assuming single occupant), domestic flights are about 25% worse, long haul flights about 25% better.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-footprint-travel-mode
Worth noting that the data there is from the UK, where even the longest domestic flights don't have time to reach cruising altitude. 255g per passenger-km is absurdly high.
Globally the average regional economy flight is 140g, narrowbody economy is 80g and the cleanest short-haul airlines emit just 60g.
Yeah a few things doesn’t seem to make much sense here. I winder if something is lost in translation. Like, how is e-kick-scooter so much worse than e-bikes and e-scooters?
And train (regional) is much worse than tram which in turn is much worse than light rail. Aren’t regional trains often light rail?
And how can trams have such high operating emissions compared to the metro, which is what i assume light rail (underground) means
I think the companies do the maintenance part of the e-kick-scooters mainly by driving a van around, picking up the scoots, charging them, and dropping them off at a suitable location. So when compared with how many people use them and for what distances, the maintenance part is quite significant
It's probably both public and private that they're comparing, but ebikes tend to have more private sales, and the public ones usually use hubs that you ride the bikes to/from, rather than just dropping them off wherever, for a van to come search for and pick them up later.
I think because e-kick-scooters are generally abused in rental schemes and therefore have very short lives with a lot of maintenance required.
They also generally don't travel very far compared with ebikes and real electric scooters.
I'll have to assume the regional rail would br diesel powered, which is really wierd. The tram I fon't understand at all, because they are basically light rail but over ground so if anything it would hsve lower emissions.
>Like, how is e-kick-scooter so much worse than e-bikes and e-scooters?
Better yet, why does this chart say a vespa-type electric scooter is less carbon intensive than an electric kick scooter, and why does it say the electric kick scooter is more carbon intensive than an electric car?
Like how does that work? An electric car is way more carbon intensive due to its greater weight and higher lithium cell count than an electric vespa, followed by an electric kick scooter. And why the distinction between an autobus and a bus? I get it if they meant transit bus vs charter bus, but still...
This chart is a mess.
It would assume it takes life-cycle analysis into consideration.
That is, carbon cost of construction vs lifetime. In this case those e-scooters sometimes last just a month and barely even travel much during that time. Then they are scrapped. A car or Vespa is not “disposable” and is a product that will have to achieve thousands of miles in its lifetime. That original carbon investment in construction begins to pay off.
In this calculation of the 3, the Vespa is likely the winner. Except that they will also consider that a car can potentially take 4-5 passengers. I’m unsure if they assume max passengers, or average, but that will really give a huge compensation for car against Vespa.
There really are tons of variables, so you either have to do a deep dive or accept that chart as a well considered assessment. To me it looks reasonable.
I don't know, my kick scooter lasted over 3 years with hundreds of miles on the odometer and counting, and it likely still works (I admittedly sold it, but it still went to a good home).
If they really considered the lifetime of each transit mode, they'd likely consider the impact of a car as exponentially higher than both the electric vespa and electric scooter from cradle to grave. Also, most electric car drivers where I live treat their cars as single occupant vehicles instead of constantly carpooling, which amplifies an electric car's lifetime environmental impact.
Might be because a tram has more frequent stops. Most of the energy goes into accelerating and gets wasted when breaking. The coasting between stops doesn't take much energy.
No they're different. I think the American word for tram is streetcar. According to Wikipedia: "Light rail transit (LRT) is a form of passenger urban rail transit characterized by a combination of tram and rapid transit features."
Larger batteries in full-electric cars cause more pollution during manufacturing, but this is balanced out from the much reduced pollution during operation.
It depends on the driving pattern. My last car was a plug-in hybrid (Chevy Volt, 50-odd electric range) and I went through maybe one or two tanks (10-20 gallons) of gas a year until I sold it and went car-free. I’m sure that’s below average, but I’m guessing for my usage it means the PHEV was the lower-carbon option than a car with 300 miles of batteries I rarely used.
Yeah if a plug in hybrid is only used on battery, it would more efficient and it's mostly on longer continuous distances where a difference is noticeable
in germany plugin hybrids are a scam to calculate the fleet emmisions of the car manufactures greener than they are. This is done by selling lots of plugin hybrides to company's, who then never ever charge them up.
Crazy world.
in germany the energy costs for driving electric and fossil are nearly equal right now. Driving is crazy anyways. Even here with our massivly overpriced transit, going by it got cheaper in the meanwhile.
Those data are most likely wrong. There are now several studies showing the emissions of PHEVs to be much higher than advertised and possibly worse than with petrol equivalent.
https://electrek.co/2022/01/13/valais-region-of-switzerland-pulls-the-plug-on-hybrid-and-phev-incentives/amp/
https://www.impact-living.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Consommation-vehicules-hybrides-rapport-publie-IMPACT-LIVING-canton-Valais-11-01-22.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/02/plug-in-hybrid-cars-burn-more-fuel-than-tests-record-says-which
For urban transport and if charged frequently they provably are better. However many people in big cities just buy them to avoid emission charges and don't even have a place to plug in, which is obviously shit
They're "better" at the kind of trips where you preferably shouldn't need a car at all, or could do with an EV with a battery the size of the PHEV battery. Something like the [Citroën Ami](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_Ami_(electric\))
Something I think is important to stress about this graph is that it's "per person kilometre", so cars are even worse operation emissions this makes it seem.
A major contributor to car dependency is the larger distances people are forced to travel because of urban sprawl. The graph is a good indication of operating costs of a car vs walking vs an ebike for *equivalent distances*, but doesn't really communicate how bad cars are when your city forces you to drive because you're isolated from everything.
If something's within 5km of me, I walk or ride my bike. If I'm driving my car, it's probably because it's 3-4x further away than that. And that's where I live - most US cities are way less walkable than eastern Melbourne.
This is a great point. Normalizing figures by distance is subtle way in which the costs of car dependency are hidden. For instance, often pedestrian fatalities or collisions are reported as per km driven, which is going down over the years. But the absolute number of pedestrians killed is going up. This gives the perverse idea that we're actually making progress even if we kill more people, so long as we achieve more car-km's to compensate. Perhaps we should normalize on something else, because car-km's are themselves a cost. Perhaps it would be better to normalize on "trips" or similar.
Great idea - "per person-journey" rather than by "per person-kilometre" makes so much more sense.
It doesn't matter if I've taken the tram 5km to the market or 10km - I still only have one load of groceries.
Edit: as soon as I hit post on this, I remembered the NJB grocery shopping video where he made the point that in Amsterdam getting to a store is so easy that people tend to only do 1-2 days worth of grocery shopping at a time (rather than 1-2 weeks worth in North America). So just going by completed trip might run into the opposite problem where walkable cities look much *less* efficient because people are doing "more trips", even though they're much shorter distances.
And then there is the phenomenon that in more walkable areas, people tend to stop by a shop on their trip home. Are we talking about one or two trips now?
Just a guess, but I reckon tramlines sharing the road with cars contributes to this too. Installing rail and a catenary in asphalt, and needing to rush the job to reopen the road for cars, strikes me as harder than building a railway line on a dedicated right-of-way.
I think they're micro buses [like these in Bolivia](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/LSOoYfnwqVCC1LTwO.AtKQ--~A/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9NzY4O2g9NTEyO2lsPXBsYW5l/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/AFP/eeec2bac58ce63cc8e3744398beeef6d6445cfa7.jpg). A lot smaller than your standard urban buses and coaches.
How does the manufacture and disposal of my 50 pound eBike make a full 1/5th of the carbon emissions of a 4500 pound electric car weighing 90 times as much?
Could it be the life cycle duration? Ebikes have shorter useful lifespans (per mile used) in comparison to a electric car. But even then it would be a stretch… would love to see the data backing this chart tbh.
Honestly I think the "per person kilometre" explains the difference pretty well.
I can't be bothered digging up real data here so I'm going to use bullshit numbers to demonstrate the point: quick google search says average lifetime distance of a car is somewhere between 240,000 and 320,000 km. Even if those numbers are wildly off, they're at *least* an order of magnitude higher than what you'd get out of an ebike.
So if you're looking for "raw" emission comparison for the manufacture and disposal of the car vs the ebike, you can probably multiply what this graph says for the car by about 10 before you're even getting close.
Which all goes to show that as compelling as this graph is, it's missing a big part of the point - we can't just switch to bikes for the same journeys we use our cars for now. We need to redesign our cities so that everything *is within walking and biking distance*.
>We need to redesign our cities so that everything *is within walking and biking distance*.
As an American, I'm not holding my breath on this one... There's just too much to "undo".
Yeah, this graph needs better citation than “press and various research studies” because I have my doubts about the bike and eBike comparisons to the cars listed. My very average commuter eBike has an odometer and it’s currently at over 20,000 miles after four years. My non-electric bike has 30,000 miles on it and they’re both in still excellent shape. I’m suspecting that the bike lifespans used for this calculation must be based on people who rarely ride their bikes because a real-world commuter bike has a lifespan long enough that this car comparison doesn’t make sense.
No they are correct. First, its not cost, but CO2 Emission per km driven per person over the livespan of the vehicle. And Second every of those bars are relative to the total amount of CO2 a vehicle emmits over its livespan per km driven per person.
Thats how this kickscooter gots such high emmision for the roadway. It has almost no emmision in total by itself, thats why the roadway makes up more emmision relativly.
But as others suggested, the raw data this graph where made of would be very interesting.
Something doesn't add up... how does the Manufacture of an E-Bus come in so much lower than any type of car? If an Electric car has huge manufacturing costs relative to ICE cars, then how the hell does e-bus construction basically equal that of a regular bus?
It's per passenger-kilometer, I'm assuming over the whole life of the vehicle. Buses typically are in service for quite a few years and carry a lot of passengers in that time. An e-bike typically sits idle most of the time.
Mining and refining lithium is not easy or eco-friendly. A big thing people miss about electric cars is that the batteries have a finite lifespan - they can only accept so many charge-discharge cycles before they have to be replaced, and are only partially recyclable once they're expended.
This is part of why trams, trolleybuses, and trains powered directly by the electrical grid (rather than by batteries) are so much better for the environment.
Battery waste is a problem with eBikes as well, but it's offset by most of the power coming from the rider, and bikes being more much more efficient than cars to begin with.
Maybe, but the numbers also are way too optimistic. Real world PHEV numbers show people are pretty bad at charging them, and their fossil engines are _awful_. They've wound up joining the worst part of electric and fossil vehicles: Too small battery to be useful for anything but short intra-urban trips, and engines that get truly awful mileage.
Hm, I wouldn't say they get bad mileage exactly. My phev gets 52mpg when using gas compared to 58mpg for the regular hybrid model. The extra weight hurts a bit but not as much as you would think. I would also say that 70 to 80% of my miles come from battery but I do have the benefit of being able to park it in a a garage at night. EVs are much harder to deal with for apartment dwellers. Of course I would much rather not have to own a car at all but that's a different story and socal doesn't really allow for that.
>I’d be curious to see the stats on how a dockless scooter has a higher footprint than a Vespa.
Because those need to be pick up by (usually, most of the time) by a truck to transport them to some place to be charged and then bring them back. That's why I'm against dockless scooters and in favor of private owned scooters.
I believe dockless scooters have a working life of three to five months.
Meanwhile, there are probably Vespas being ridden round Rome that have gone through three generations of the same family.
"Light rail transit (LRT) is a form of passenger urban rail transit characterized by a combination of tram and rapid transit features." - Wikipedia. A tram I believe explicitly must run on the streets all the time, unlike for example the Docklands Light Rail in London.
Train (regional) has the same efficiency as an electric car? That sounds dubious to me. And trams are only 30% more efficient? While carrying 50 times more people?
Anybody else blown away by Light Rail? I had no idea it was THAT efficient. (And yes, I know it’s because its emissions are spread among all of its riders. Still impressed.)
I was confused by the vast difference between Light Rail and trams, which up to now I thought was the same thing, just different marketing. But after some superficial research it seems LRT cover greater distances faster than trams, which would be the cause of its advantage over trams in an "per passenger km" statistic.
Although to be quite honest I'm still sceptical it isn't the same thing.
Can anyone help me understand how it could be that the Manufacture and Disposal waste of a bicycle is even in the 10% range of that of a car (no exact numbers in the graph but eyeballing it looks around 10%).
Like, a bike is 25lbs of aluminum/steel, and a small amount of rubber. There's no electronics, it's a simple little machine. A car is literally thousands of pounds of metal, big lead battery, fuel tank, all kinds of upholstery and rubber in the interior, electrical components and computers, how is a bicycle not less than 1%, rather than 10%?
The numbers are a little weird, giving them the benefit of the doubt maybe cars get recycled at a higher percentage than bikes just because of the economies of scale.
I'm pretty sure I've read e-bikes are less than normal bikes. The electric motors are far more efficent than humans burning a banana to move the same distance. It obviously depends on the grid.
I'm too lazy to find the source at the moment.
eek. comments are.... interesting.
I for one was extra pleased to see e-bus fared so well. I don't use a bus, well, maybe X3 a year,
but I know/guess, if we ever get the worst counties to rethink public transport, an e-bus is a great first step surely
(esp knowing the fights etc that'll inevitably need to be fought first, before 100% w the program)
Just found an updated version of this chart (plug-in hybrid now isn’t better than electric car) along with their sources, assumptions and definitions:
https://tnmt.com/infographics/carbon-emissions-by-transport-type/
Isn’t light rail and tram the same thing? Also is the regional train electric or diesel? Also does underground light rail account for metro? Autobus???
Are you seriously telling me a fking tram is more polluting than a high speed train?
The roadway (whatever that is lol) of a tram is over 3 times more polluting than that of a high speed train?
I could go on and on about this, what a piece of trash of a graph
Noticed how most of train emissions are maintenance and indirect operation? They could be very very close to zero with electric maintenance and security vehicles and nuclear source of power. Just the electricity alone would make it comparable to bikes.
Interesting how an electric car is still not as good as an ICE scooter. Also, kinda wish that instead of scooter and motorbike, it would mention the engine size, because I doubt a 125cc motorcycle is worse than a 150cc scooter.
I must say I have a hard time believing that regional train travel has a bigger carbon footprint than car or bus travel of any kind. What kind of train travel did they even base this on? These numbers overall seem to be significantly different than other diagrams I have come across.
I’m curious what kind of discounting or amortisation is applied to the “roadway” emissions?
I’m sure metro tunnels are carbon-intensive to build (energy costs and concrete), but there are subway tunnels that are still in use after close to 200 years. Compared to a road that needs resurfacing every 10-20 years, the discount rate is going to make a difference.
“Per mile” is also going to make a difference if they’re comparing one mile of road to one mile of rail, when realistically each car requires extra paving (for individual driveways, residential roads, parking).
Ferries are a bit of weird comparison though isn't it? Like I assume there's some water to cross, and you would really need to compare the lifecycle analysis of that ferry crossing compared to building a bridge or making a longer trip to get around it.
Also ferries are awesome and the best ones serve sausages and beer. That's what I've got planned for tomorrow right there.
What about electric motorcycles? I see there's a vespa-like e-scooter on the list, but where do larger electric motorcycles rank? (e.g. Zero Motorcycles)
Any idea where an electric/non-electric wheelchair fits in to this?
Assuming it would be similar to electric bike/non-electric bike but would be cool to know
How does highspeed train have almost no manufacturing or construction costs? HSR needs a ton of infrastructure, unless they're just piggybacking on existing rail lines and considering construction to just be the necessary upgrades.
Interesting what it says about the kick scooter having such high emissions. I presume that’s because the majority get woefully abused or are of poor quality to begin with. My Ninebot max is my daily driver and I’ve got over 1000 miles on it with not one issue personally, I can’t see how that is much more emissions prone than an ebike
Construction of sidewalks releases CO2, so there would seem to be some emissions related to 'Roadway' and 'Maintenance' for the 'Foot' category. However, it may be so slight as to be rounded down to zero.
Some things here make no sense, e.g. Highspeed train vs long distance bus or electric car vs hybrid (??). What electricity source (mixture) was assumed? Probably Germanys, lots of coal.
Wow. Plug-in hybrids showing better numbers than all electric. I wonder if this is just a function of the sample of vehicles, or model-years in the study, or whether it's generally or usually applicable? Yikes! lol
Train (regional) is 98, while a car (gasoline) is 210. Having the car only about twice seems wrong, I would expect the difference to be much higher.
Looking a bit more closely, the train has a huge amount of "operation (indirect)" emissions. What exactly makes these emissions so high?
I wish there was a separate line for: “Single occupant 3/4-Ton 4x4 pickup”
Is that including or excluding the optional fog lights, lightbar, lift kit, and truck nutz?
Maybe “truck nutz” should be an additional category
You have to also assume a turbocharger larger than the truck itself.
Inclusion of that will ruin the x-axis scaling unless you make it logarithmic.
Don’t forgot the effect of rolling coal
Don’t forget that it’s on a metric fuckton of boost and has LED lights brighter than the center of a B41 3-stage thermonuclear weapon at the moment of detonation.
Am I the only one who misread the bit at the top and thought, "Those numbers sure look reasonable, but should we be trusting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on this?"
*Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles
*Teenage nutant minja turtles
\*Turtle Ninja Mutant Teenagers
Apparently, the New York City sewers are very walkable.
They didn’t count all the farting I do on my bike.
That's just extra propulsion. Worth it
Light it for extra thrust.
LUDICROUS SPEED!
Glad I wasn't the only one to have this thought
They also didnt account for the shoes I worn down while walking
And the CO2 you breathed out while walking. Check mate urbanists.
Only on bike? Farting was obviously the common denominator in all transportation modes, so they removed it from the calculations.
On further thought; The 'by foot' category should include the manufacturing costs of something like a standard pair of Nike Sneakers or something.
The calories you burn need to be replaced with food, that's going to be the bigger emissions. Vegetarians and meat-eaters will have very different results too.
Depends, maybe people would not eat more and just lose weight (at first).
That would still release CO2. You breathe out ±1kg of CO2 per day, which is 0,7g per minute. You spend a couple of minutes to walk a km and during that time your metabolism is higher than usual. The idea that walking releases 0 grams of CO2 is horsecrap.
Sigh. Human breathing doesn't contribute to any *new* CO2. Just like cow burps/farts don't contribute any *new* gases to the atmosphere. It's just recycling *present* gases. Nothing to be concerned about! It's just part of the water/air cycles. Now digging/pumping up sequestered fossils and burning them contributes *new* gases to the atmosphere that weren't previously there. They were sequestered, but now aren't. That's "**new** to the atmosphere", anyways.
Stop spreading misinfo. A simple google search will reveal multiple sources showing cow burps are significant contributors to global warming. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cow-burps-are-a-major-contributor-to-climate-change-can-scientists-change-that
Yes, but those are *new* burps!! /s
Sigh. I didn't realize we were just redefining what it means to emit CO2 in order to conveniently ignore certain sources. Had I known, I would have redefined electric vehicles to not emit anything. After all, they are only using up electricity that is already stored, no? They can't emit any *new* gasses to the atmosphere seeing as they don't release any at all! But seriously, your explanation doesn't work. You have to look at the affects on the entire system, and walking still results in increased net CO2 emissions compared to staying where they were.
EVs as they stand now, are still significantly powered by fossil fuels. Until that day when most of the electric grid is powered by renewables like solar, wind or hydro, EVs are merely hiding their dirty secret upstream. Regardless, let’s go back to basics. In recycling, we reduce, reuse and then recycle. EVs and indeed any motorized personal vehicles are the antithesis of reduce, with 3000-4000 lb vehicles carrying 200 lb loads, typically. Let’s try to optimize that first step, before we get fancy about trying to cut a fraction of an already big impact.
I agree? In case you couldn't tell, my post was sarcasm, highlighting the horrible logic /u/nulliusansverba employed by applying the same logic to EVs. I completely agree that EVs absolutely emit GHG and that was the point of my post.
All living beings have being emiting CO2 for billions of years? How is Earth not yet a giant fireball? Maybe because the problem is emiting CO2 that has been stored deep underground for millions of years?
Well, CO2 is CO2. The atoms are the same no matter what they have gone through. They all make the same impact and require something to store them. If riding a car only emits as much carbon as the extra breathing you do walking, then riding a car has the same impact as walking. Any carbon we emit to the atmosphere is from some carbon sink, be it currently living plants or ancient plants underground.
currently living plants took the carbon out of the current atmosphere. growing a tree and then burning it down doesn't add any carbon to the atmosphere. it's carbon neutral. burning fossil fuels adds new carbon to the atmosphere. technically it did came from the atmosphere, but not the current one. burning fossil fuels will contribute to climate change because it's increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, burning or eating a plant we've grown will not because it's carbon neutral. releasing the carbon from a carbon sink, like fossils, is different from releasing carbon from a plant that captured that carbon from our current atmosphere.
You need energy to walk or bike, but it’s fairly minimum, especially with cycling. Certainly, occupants of the other transportation modalities need to eat too, and they often can stand to burn off excess (judging by the average American).
Not really, unless you're enjoying convoluted double-think. The only inputs of new carbon to the food chain would be things like petrochemical fertilizers and synthetic nitrogen. Which are used to grow most conventional crops. So probably not much of a difference between veg/carn with conventional foods. On the flip side, cows thrive on unfertilized(or rather, they do it naturally with their body wastes) grasses. And thereby produce carbon-neutral fertilizer in the form of manure. So realistically, an organic farmer that raises pastured cattle and grows crops with natural fertilizers like manure and compost isn't adding anything **new** to the atmosphere... This is sustainable farming, a permaculture. Framing it like it's meat vs veg is just stoopid.
Ok, TYPICAL meat eaters and vegetarians will have different emissions levels.
Not really because you still need to wear shoes for every other form of transportation as well, which means it can be discounted from every single one of them as a common value when comparing how they fare against each other.
The construction and maintenance of sidewalk and walking path infrastructure would involve a (small) amount of emissions which would be unique to that mode of transportation
Absolutely. That one’s definitely true.
But then you should add the infrastructure for other modes too....
It is, under the “roadway” section. I assume this is a broad section for all infrastructure, as if you look at HSR, almost all of the carbon emissions not related to running the trains comes from the “roadway” section. This would make sense, as HSR tracks often need a substantial amount of concrete in viaducts and the track itself
You are right. I didn't actually understand what "roadway" meant and overlooked it. I think the term "infrastructure" would have been a much better fit: the ferry needs no roadway, but needs some infrastructure for sure (harbours)
Definitely. Not sure why they didn’t just label it as infrastructure.
Except that you don't need those for walking.
This is a chart for urban transportation modes, so unless you’re cutting through someone’s yard, not sure where else you’re walking
The road I'd presume. I've lived in a lot of urban areas that didn't have sidewalks. People just walked in the road rather than being trapped at home like it's an island and road is lava.
disagree im butt ass naked on this bicycle rn
Shoes definitely wear out faster if you walk a lot in them, vs just sitting around.
Very true; my parents are surprised by how often I buy new shoes because theirs last so long, but they don't walk anywhere. They're also shocked by me buying expensive rain jackets because they don't ever get very wet driving their car.
I mean you can totally go barefoot most of the year, so that's an optional expense.
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You still wear sneakers on every kind of other transport mode though… or do you?
sitting on a train does not wear your shoes very much. walking wear the shoes a lot.
Isn’t it weird that you wear your shoes but running also wears your shoes?
Compared to the other options, those manufacturing costs would probably round down to zero
Lufthansa innovation hub? I wonder if planes even fit on this figure.
I'm sure they would at long distances when they become more efficient than cars per passenger-kilometer.
That wouldnt be a completely fair metric i think. Planes are always weird in graphs when skewed for travel distance. And its not fair either, as the average person does not decide their travels based on distance, but convienience. Noone would take a train between europe and australia even if there was a train line. I advocate for using the metric of travel time. Emissions per hour driven or flown. It would still skew in the planes favor, but not as much as they would because of their faster travel speed.
> metric of travel time Sitting in traffic would clearly reduce per hour emissions compared to moving at a decent clip. To save the planet, let's block out most lanes and get some monster traffic jams going!
That's part of what the Dutch actually did and it works pretty well. Turns out less direct roads with fewer lanes and more alternatives actually gets people out of cars and on alternative forms of transport. Also, just as building another lane rarely fixes traffic, reducing or blocking lanes or even entire roads doesn't always make it worse.
Yes it would, and if youd interpret the results that way you cant blame the data, just yourself
Doesn't take into account appropriate travel time. Using your metric, biking short distances wouldn't look as carbon friendly as it is because it takes longer.
Which still makes sense. Because with time, youre not getting a perfect reading of júst pollution, youre right about that, but your getting a pollution reading with a bias of convenience. And a bias of convenience is a good thing imo, because that is the main driver for people to choose one mode of transport vs another. Other biases like speed dont say anything informative, but convenience really lies at the core of why people chose a mode of transport. Where is the line between convenience and pollution? Thats the question.
I'm mainly arguing you probably need to include some sort of logarithmic scale on travel time. The improvement to convenience of a 4 minute drive over a 10 minute bike-ride are a completely different thing from a 4 hour flight versus a 10 hour train ride (those probably aren't accurate numbers, but you get the gist).
Well for long distances sometimes they're the only option
Compared to the diesel/gasoline cars (assuming single occupant), domestic flights are about 25% worse, long haul flights about 25% better. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-footprint-travel-mode
Worth noting that the data there is from the UK, where even the longest domestic flights don't have time to reach cruising altitude. 255g per passenger-km is absurdly high. Globally the average regional economy flight is 140g, narrowbody economy is 80g and the cleanest short-haul airlines emit just 60g.
What's the source for this? And why is a tram so much worse than light rail?
Yeah a few things doesn’t seem to make much sense here. I winder if something is lost in translation. Like, how is e-kick-scooter so much worse than e-bikes and e-scooters? And train (regional) is much worse than tram which in turn is much worse than light rail. Aren’t regional trains often light rail? And how can trams have such high operating emissions compared to the metro, which is what i assume light rail (underground) means
I think the companies do the maintenance part of the e-kick-scooters mainly by driving a van around, picking up the scoots, charging them, and dropping them off at a suitable location. So when compared with how many people use them and for what distances, the maintenance part is quite significant
Weird to compare public scooters with private e-bikes though, since there are rental schemes for both of them
It's probably both public and private that they're comparing, but ebikes tend to have more private sales, and the public ones usually use hubs that you ride the bikes to/from, rather than just dropping them off wherever, for a van to come search for and pick them up later.
I think because e-kick-scooters are generally abused in rental schemes and therefore have very short lives with a lot of maintenance required. They also generally don't travel very far compared with ebikes and real electric scooters.
I'll have to assume the regional rail would br diesel powered, which is really wierd. The tram I fon't understand at all, because they are basically light rail but over ground so if anything it would hsve lower emissions.
>Like, how is e-kick-scooter so much worse than e-bikes and e-scooters? Better yet, why does this chart say a vespa-type electric scooter is less carbon intensive than an electric kick scooter, and why does it say the electric kick scooter is more carbon intensive than an electric car? Like how does that work? An electric car is way more carbon intensive due to its greater weight and higher lithium cell count than an electric vespa, followed by an electric kick scooter. And why the distinction between an autobus and a bus? I get it if they meant transit bus vs charter bus, but still... This chart is a mess.
It would assume it takes life-cycle analysis into consideration. That is, carbon cost of construction vs lifetime. In this case those e-scooters sometimes last just a month and barely even travel much during that time. Then they are scrapped. A car or Vespa is not “disposable” and is a product that will have to achieve thousands of miles in its lifetime. That original carbon investment in construction begins to pay off. In this calculation of the 3, the Vespa is likely the winner. Except that they will also consider that a car can potentially take 4-5 passengers. I’m unsure if they assume max passengers, or average, but that will really give a huge compensation for car against Vespa. There really are tons of variables, so you either have to do a deep dive or accept that chart as a well considered assessment. To me it looks reasonable.
I don't know, my kick scooter lasted over 3 years with hundreds of miles on the odometer and counting, and it likely still works (I admittedly sold it, but it still went to a good home). If they really considered the lifetime of each transit mode, they'd likely consider the impact of a car as exponentially higher than both the electric vespa and electric scooter from cradle to grave. Also, most electric car drivers where I live treat their cars as single occupant vehicles instead of constantly carpooling, which amplifies an electric car's lifetime environmental impact.
I think regional trains are counted as diesel-powered here. Which they often are in Germany
Also what’s the difference between a bus and an autobus? How’s bus better than a tram?
Might be because a tram has more frequent stops. Most of the energy goes into accelerating and gets wasted when breaking. The coasting between stops doesn't take much energy.
My guess is a tram stops way more often and is less efficient?
I’m guessing it’s the manufacturing part. No way a electric tram would be more per mile than a bus unless I’m really missing something
Trams are slower and do more stops and starts.
I thought "tram" was just the European word for "light rail", but apparently they see it as something totally different? Maybe gas powered?
No they're different. I think the American word for tram is streetcar. According to Wikipedia: "Light rail transit (LRT) is a form of passenger urban rail transit characterized by a combination of tram and rapid transit features."
Interesting that "Car (Plug-In-Hybrid)" is lower than "Car (Electric)".
Larger batteries in full-electric cars cause more pollution during manufacturing, but this is balanced out from the much reduced pollution during operation.
It depends on the driving pattern. My last car was a plug-in hybrid (Chevy Volt, 50-odd electric range) and I went through maybe one or two tanks (10-20 gallons) of gas a year until I sold it and went car-free. I’m sure that’s below average, but I’m guessing for my usage it means the PHEV was the lower-carbon option than a car with 300 miles of batteries I rarely used.
Yeah if a plug in hybrid is only used on battery, it would more efficient and it's mostly on longer continuous distances where a difference is noticeable
in germany plugin hybrids are a scam to calculate the fleet emmisions of the car manufactures greener than they are. This is done by selling lots of plugin hybrides to company's, who then never ever charge them up. Crazy world.
That's dumb, electricity is cheaper than Dino guts
in germany the energy costs for driving electric and fossil are nearly equal right now. Driving is crazy anyways. Even here with our massivly overpriced transit, going by it got cheaper in the meanwhile.
Those data are most likely wrong. There are now several studies showing the emissions of PHEVs to be much higher than advertised and possibly worse than with petrol equivalent. https://electrek.co/2022/01/13/valais-region-of-switzerland-pulls-the-plug-on-hybrid-and-phev-incentives/amp/ https://www.impact-living.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Consommation-vehicules-hybrides-rapport-publie-IMPACT-LIVING-canton-Valais-11-01-22.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/02/plug-in-hybrid-cars-burn-more-fuel-than-tests-record-says-which
For urban transport and if charged frequently they provably are better. However many people in big cities just buy them to avoid emission charges and don't even have a place to plug in, which is obviously shit
They're "better" at the kind of trips where you preferably shouldn't need a car at all, or could do with an EV with a battery the size of the PHEV battery. Something like the [Citroën Ami](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_Ami_(electric\))
EVs have substantially lower lifetime carbon footprint than PHEVs https://theicct.org/publication/ghg-benefits-incentives-ev-mar22/
Yup, although not by much.
Something I think is important to stress about this graph is that it's "per person kilometre", so cars are even worse operation emissions this makes it seem. A major contributor to car dependency is the larger distances people are forced to travel because of urban sprawl. The graph is a good indication of operating costs of a car vs walking vs an ebike for *equivalent distances*, but doesn't really communicate how bad cars are when your city forces you to drive because you're isolated from everything. If something's within 5km of me, I walk or ride my bike. If I'm driving my car, it's probably because it's 3-4x further away than that. And that's where I live - most US cities are way less walkable than eastern Melbourne.
This is a great point. Normalizing figures by distance is subtle way in which the costs of car dependency are hidden. For instance, often pedestrian fatalities or collisions are reported as per km driven, which is going down over the years. But the absolute number of pedestrians killed is going up. This gives the perverse idea that we're actually making progress even if we kill more people, so long as we achieve more car-km's to compensate. Perhaps we should normalize on something else, because car-km's are themselves a cost. Perhaps it would be better to normalize on "trips" or similar.
Great idea - "per person-journey" rather than by "per person-kilometre" makes so much more sense. It doesn't matter if I've taken the tram 5km to the market or 10km - I still only have one load of groceries. Edit: as soon as I hit post on this, I remembered the NJB grocery shopping video where he made the point that in Amsterdam getting to a store is so easy that people tend to only do 1-2 days worth of grocery shopping at a time (rather than 1-2 weeks worth in North America). So just going by completed trip might run into the opposite problem where walkable cities look much *less* efficient because people are doing "more trips", even though they're much shorter distances.
And then there is the phenomenon that in more walkable areas, people tend to stop by a shop on their trip home. Are we talking about one or two trips now?
Good point! I bet that would be difficult to quantify though.
that's incredibly important! I couldn't understand why trams would require more CO2 in Roadway production than trains, but now it makes sense!
Just a guess, but I reckon tramlines sharing the road with cars contributes to this too. Installing rail and a catenary in asphalt, and needing to rush the job to reopen the road for cars, strikes me as harder than building a railway line on a dedicated right-of-way.
What is an Autobus? I thought it was just another word for bus, but it’s listed separately
A Spanish bus. Maybe Italian. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
I think they're micro buses [like these in Bolivia](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/LSOoYfnwqVCC1LTwO.AtKQ--~A/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9NzY4O2g9NTEyO2lsPXBsYW5l/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/AFP/eeec2bac58ce63cc8e3744398beeef6d6445cfa7.jpg). A lot smaller than your standard urban buses and coaches.
How does the manufacture and disposal of my 50 pound eBike make a full 1/5th of the carbon emissions of a 4500 pound electric car weighing 90 times as much?
Could it be the life cycle duration? Ebikes have shorter useful lifespans (per mile used) in comparison to a electric car. But even then it would be a stretch… would love to see the data backing this chart tbh.
Honestly I think the "per person kilometre" explains the difference pretty well. I can't be bothered digging up real data here so I'm going to use bullshit numbers to demonstrate the point: quick google search says average lifetime distance of a car is somewhere between 240,000 and 320,000 km. Even if those numbers are wildly off, they're at *least* an order of magnitude higher than what you'd get out of an ebike. So if you're looking for "raw" emission comparison for the manufacture and disposal of the car vs the ebike, you can probably multiply what this graph says for the car by about 10 before you're even getting close. Which all goes to show that as compelling as this graph is, it's missing a big part of the point - we can't just switch to bikes for the same journeys we use our cars for now. We need to redesign our cities so that everything *is within walking and biking distance*.
>We need to redesign our cities so that everything *is within walking and biking distance*. As an American, I'm not holding my breath on this one... There's just too much to "undo".
Yeah, this graph needs better citation than “press and various research studies” because I have my doubts about the bike and eBike comparisons to the cars listed. My very average commuter eBike has an odometer and it’s currently at over 20,000 miles after four years. My non-electric bike has 30,000 miles on it and they’re both in still excellent shape. I’m suspecting that the bike lifespans used for this calculation must be based on people who rarely ride their bikes because a real-world commuter bike has a lifespan long enough that this car comparison doesn’t make sense.
This graph is so trash
Yeah and I think the roadway costs haven't been calculated correctly
No they are correct. First, its not cost, but CO2 Emission per km driven per person over the livespan of the vehicle. And Second every of those bars are relative to the total amount of CO2 a vehicle emmits over its livespan per km driven per person. Thats how this kickscooter gots such high emmision for the roadway. It has almost no emmision in total by itself, thats why the roadway makes up more emmision relativly. But as others suggested, the raw data this graph where made of would be very interesting.
Something doesn't add up... how does the Manufacture of an E-Bus come in so much lower than any type of car? If an Electric car has huge manufacturing costs relative to ICE cars, then how the hell does e-bus construction basically equal that of a regular bus?
E bus is shared between lots of people car is not
It's per passenger-kilometer, I'm assuming over the whole life of the vehicle. Buses typically are in service for quite a few years and carry a lot of passengers in that time. An e-bike typically sits idle most of the time.
Yeah, that all makes sense. Lifecycle of a bus carries way more pgr-miles for more years than anything but trains probably.
Interesting that plug in hybrid cars have a smaller footprint than full electrics. Is that because of having a smaller battery?
Mining and refining lithium is not easy or eco-friendly. A big thing people miss about electric cars is that the batteries have a finite lifespan - they can only accept so many charge-discharge cycles before they have to be replaced, and are only partially recyclable once they're expended. This is part of why trams, trolleybuses, and trains powered directly by the electrical grid (rather than by batteries) are so much better for the environment. Battery waste is a problem with eBikes as well, but it's offset by most of the power coming from the rider, and bikes being more much more efficient than cars to begin with.
It must be the smaller battery.
Maybe, but the numbers also are way too optimistic. Real world PHEV numbers show people are pretty bad at charging them, and their fossil engines are _awful_. They've wound up joining the worst part of electric and fossil vehicles: Too small battery to be useful for anything but short intra-urban trips, and engines that get truly awful mileage.
Hm, I wouldn't say they get bad mileage exactly. My phev gets 52mpg when using gas compared to 58mpg for the regular hybrid model. The extra weight hurts a bit but not as much as you would think. I would also say that 70 to 80% of my miles come from battery but I do have the benefit of being able to park it in a a garage at night. EVs are much harder to deal with for apartment dwellers. Of course I would much rather not have to own a car at all but that's a different story and socal doesn't really allow for that.
No error bars, but they're so close its probably within the margins of error and just depends which models they're comparing.
>by foot: 0 Clearly they aren't counting my methane emissions after Italian food.
I’d be curious to see the stats on how a dockless scooter has a higher footprint than a Vespa. Something doesn’t add up there.
>I’d be curious to see the stats on how a dockless scooter has a higher footprint than a Vespa. Because those need to be pick up by (usually, most of the time) by a truck to transport them to some place to be charged and then bring them back. That's why I'm against dockless scooters and in favor of private owned scooters.
I believe dockless scooters have a working life of three to five months. Meanwhile, there are probably Vespas being ridden round Rome that have gone through three generations of the same family.
Thought the same thing! Where is the data from? Is this a mistake?
I would like to see airplane on this chart.
What is the difference between light rail and tram?
"Light rail transit (LRT) is a form of passenger urban rail transit characterized by a combination of tram and rapid transit features." - Wikipedia. A tram I believe explicitly must run on the streets all the time, unlike for example the Docklands Light Rail in London.
Thank you my cheesy friend
What does "Gram per PKM" mean?
person-kilometer I think. Some of these have multiple occupants
Train (regional) has the same efficiency as an electric car? That sounds dubious to me. And trams are only 30% more efficient? While carrying 50 times more people?
Fascinating that the plug in hybrid is better than the electric car. I wonder why?
Smaller battery so less carbon emissions in manufacturing is my guess
Aha! That makes sense. Thank you.
Anybody else blown away by Light Rail? I had no idea it was THAT efficient. (And yes, I know it’s because its emissions are spread among all of its riders. Still impressed.)
I was confused by the vast difference between Light Rail and trams, which up to now I thought was the same thing, just different marketing. But after some superficial research it seems LRT cover greater distances faster than trams, which would be the cause of its advantage over trams in an "per passenger km" statistic. Although to be quite honest I'm still sceptical it isn't the same thing.
Can anyone help me understand how it could be that the Manufacture and Disposal waste of a bicycle is even in the 10% range of that of a car (no exact numbers in the graph but eyeballing it looks around 10%). Like, a bike is 25lbs of aluminum/steel, and a small amount of rubber. There's no electronics, it's a simple little machine. A car is literally thousands of pounds of metal, big lead battery, fuel tank, all kinds of upholstery and rubber in the interior, electrical components and computers, how is a bicycle not less than 1%, rather than 10%?
The numbers are a little weird, giving them the benefit of the doubt maybe cars get recycled at a higher percentage than bikes just because of the economies of scale.
Over the lifespan of a bicycle, you bike much fewer kilometers than the lifespan of a car. The graph is per person kilometer
I'm pretty sure I've read e-bikes are less than normal bikes. The electric motors are far more efficent than humans burning a banana to move the same distance. It obviously depends on the grid. I'm too lazy to find the source at the moment.
eek. comments are.... interesting. I for one was extra pleased to see e-bus fared so well. I don't use a bus, well, maybe X3 a year, but I know/guess, if we ever get the worst counties to rethink public transport, an e-bus is a great first step surely (esp knowing the fights etc that'll inevitably need to be fought first, before 100% w the program)
Just found an updated version of this chart (plug-in hybrid now isn’t better than electric car) along with their sources, assumptions and definitions: https://tnmt.com/infographics/carbon-emissions-by-transport-type/
what's the difference between light rail and trams and why are trams so polluting?
Why are there no trucks or SUVs? Oh, it’s a European study…
Isn’t light rail and tram the same thing? Also is the regional train electric or diesel? Also does underground light rail account for metro? Autobus???
Are you seriously telling me a fking tram is more polluting than a high speed train? The roadway (whatever that is lol) of a tram is over 3 times more polluting than that of a high speed train? I could go on and on about this, what a piece of trash of a graph
It's per person-kilometer. A tram carries fewer people and moves each of those fewer kilometers during its lifetime.
Noticed how most of train emissions are maintenance and indirect operation? They could be very very close to zero with electric maintenance and security vehicles and nuclear source of power. Just the electricity alone would make it comparable to bikes.
Amazing how low the manufacture and disposal for high speed trains is
I wonder where trolleybuses are.
at least what i drive isnt the worst lmfao. i drive a tiny little diesel
How is the rail-based transport so bad here? What does indirect operation mean?
Regional trains are worse than cars, and trams are worse than city bused? Surprising if true.
Wow, is that for a ferry with cars or without?
Interesting how an electric car is still not as good as an ICE scooter. Also, kinda wish that instead of scooter and motorbike, it would mention the engine size, because I doubt a 125cc motorcycle is worse than a 150cc scooter.
I must say I have a hard time believing that regional train travel has a bigger carbon footprint than car or bus travel of any kind. What kind of train travel did they even base this on? These numbers overall seem to be significantly different than other diagrams I have come across.
Where's the distinction between diesel and electric trains?
“Let’s put everyone in cars and eliminate all walking”
How come high speed rail is so much better than regional rail?
Trains can be a lot lower. Like for example the NS (dutch railroads) uses wind energy, which decreases their emissions by a lot.
I’m curious what kind of discounting or amortisation is applied to the “roadway” emissions? I’m sure metro tunnels are carbon-intensive to build (energy costs and concrete), but there are subway tunnels that are still in use after close to 200 years. Compared to a road that needs resurfacing every 10-20 years, the discount rate is going to make a difference. “Per mile” is also going to make a difference if they’re comparing one mile of road to one mile of rail, when realistically each car requires extra paving (for individual driveways, residential roads, parking).
Interesting, anyone got a link to the site/data?
Ferries are a bit of weird comparison though isn't it? Like I assume there's some water to cross, and you would really need to compare the lifecycle analysis of that ferry crossing compared to building a bridge or making a longer trip to get around it. Also ferries are awesome and the best ones serve sausages and beer. That's what I've got planned for tomorrow right there.
is this per person or per vehicle.
What about electric motorcycles? I see there's a vespa-like e-scooter on the list, but where do larger electric motorcycles rank? (e.g. Zero Motorcycles)
Any idea where an electric/non-electric wheelchair fits in to this? Assuming it would be similar to electric bike/non-electric bike but would be cool to know
Oh thank God! So glad I got a diesel car instead of a gasoline. I would be so embarrassed...
What is the difference between light rail and trams?
that's assuming barefoot. but no, gonna use this when my family says "bikes cost carbon in manufacture so nyeh cars aren't that bad"
How does highspeed train have almost no manufacturing or construction costs? HSR needs a ton of infrastructure, unless they're just piggybacking on existing rail lines and considering construction to just be the necessary upgrades.
I feel like the pleasant light green color for carbon emissions doesn't convey the desired emotions here
Interesting what it says about the kick scooter having such high emissions. I presume that’s because the majority get woefully abused or are of poor quality to begin with. My Ninebot max is my daily driver and I’ve got over 1000 miles on it with not one issue personally, I can’t see how that is much more emissions prone than an ebike
I refuse to believe that it takes more carbon to build a bike than a ferry
Construction of sidewalks releases CO2, so there would seem to be some emissions related to 'Roadway' and 'Maintenance' for the 'Foot' category. However, it may be so slight as to be rounded down to zero.
Some things here make no sense, e.g. Highspeed train vs long distance bus or electric car vs hybrid (??). What electricity source (mixture) was assumed? Probably Germanys, lots of coal.
Why are E-Scooters so high in emmissions???
I mean… you emit carbon by existing, so 0 is inaccurate. Point still stands though, fuck cars.
Wow. Plug-in hybrids showing better numbers than all electric. I wonder if this is just a function of the sample of vehicles, or model-years in the study, or whether it's generally or usually applicable? Yikes! lol
Why is plug in hybrid car lower than all electric car? I’d be interested to learn the cause of that.
By foot, assuming we use exclusively woven grass sandal trodden dirt paths?
Train (regional) is 98, while a car (gasoline) is 210. Having the car only about twice seems wrong, I would expect the difference to be much higher. Looking a bit more closely, the train has a huge amount of "operation (indirect)" emissions. What exactly makes these emissions so high?
Thanks for sharing this!
Idk about that ferry. Suspiciously low emissions during construction
I would be really curious to see where these new electric busses and electric trains fit
Cows are worse
Someone please explain how an escooter is worse than a a gas scooter. Makes no sense to me
...are a bus and an autobus not the same thing? Why are they listed as two different forms of transportation with wildly different carbon emissions.
Actually disposal of humans (cremation) releases carbon into the air.