2005-07-31 13:11 | fche blog politics image wanted
Once my manly digital camera is repaired, I hope to catch a picture of a bus.
Yes, of a plain mass transit bus, preferably the rear quarter, preferably just after it’s taken off after ingesting a few passengers. I want to be reminded of my view today of one such beast, belching a ghastly black cloud of exhaust.
I find the image interesting for the following reason. The diesel buses used in Toronto all have their exhaust pipes upen upward, located in the top left rear corner, cleverly blended in with black painted grilles. It is a spot that I have no doubt is designed to be nearly invisible to the casual bus rider. Such a rider would normally see the front and right sides of the bus, If she happened to be specifically looking for the tail pipe at the usual spots, the lower rear left or right, she will not see it. She can this way snicker smugly when seeing a car or truck make plumes of gunk: she’s so much better than they are.
It is much easier to cast the car vs. mass transit issue as a simple hollywood-style good vs. evil question, than a complex quantitative one involving time, money, convenience, safety, and fuel consumption trade-offs. I think the placement of bus tailpipes is part of the political marketing machine. I want that picture to stab the smug snickerers in the eye with.
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A bus produces more pollution and burns more energy than a car, but it can also carry more people, so the real questions are (1) how full does a bus need to be before it passes the breakeven points for energy consumption and pollution, and (2) do buses do better than cars on average, given actual ridership?
I found one study at http://www.fypower.org/pdf/RES171664_sha.. that looked at total passenger and vehicle miles traveled by bus and private vehicle in the U.S., and concluded that, averaged out over the whole country, bus travel uses about half as much fuel per passenger and produces 5% of the carbon monoxide, 8% of the volatile organic compounds, and 50% of the carbon dioxide per passenger.
I don’t have the scientific background to evaluate this study properly, but I do like the fact that it does not rely on silly assumptions, such as every bus being full and every private vehicle having only one occupant. Obviously, a full bus in rush hour will be doing much better than this, while an almost-empty bus on the night run will probably be producing more pollution per passenger mile than a private vehicle. david (Email) (URL) - 2005-08-05 06:52
It is clearly possible to come up with efficiency metrics that favour buses, and probably even some that favour cars. My point is that any given simple metric, such as pollution output, is not conclusive to the trade-off effort amongst the many other criteria people find important. Frank - 2005-08-05 07:31