this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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Today I Learned

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Energy efficiency of various transport modes (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 3 weeks ago by gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de to c/til@lemmy.world
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport

that table is thoroughly fascinating. i mean all of them, there's more than one table on that article

apparently walking is the most energy-efficient transport mode of all?!?!? apart from bicycles

what i find mind-blowing is that airplanes consume approximately the same amount of energy as cars and trains. I mean i can easily see cars and trains being on the same level, but i always thought that airplanes consumed like an order of magnitude more fuel than cars. considering how everybody keeps saying that "airplanes consume so much fuel" and such. crazy.

and also boats are less efficient than i thought? boats consume 16 L/100 km while cars, trains and airplanes consume 6 L/100 km?

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[–] Jiral@lemmy.org 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

This table is heavily biased against transit. First of all it is based on data from places that have by far and large underinvested inefficient underused transit in cities built for cars and not for transit. Secondly MJ/passenger/ distance is itself heavily biased against transit. Distance travelled is of no value in itself. Getting to places of interest is of value. Transit journies are on aversge shorter because transit oriented corridors allow for more compact urban layouts. Having to drive twice as far because cars need so much space, adds no value to going to the super market.

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Buses seem to be shafted in that comparison by the fact that no one uses them in the US. Where I am, a bus gets just seven passengers only in the middle of the night. At other times, buses would be easily at the top of the table if not for the fact that our trains also move more than twenty people per car.

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That's because mass transit is, with very few exceptions, absolutely ass in the USA. People only use it as the absolute last resort. That skews the table a lot against any public transit.

[–] quick_snail@feddit.nl 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Easy problem to solve.

Increase the cost of gas to $100 per liter for consumers (exceptions for food delivery, etc) and use the surplus income to build better busses.

Boom. Everyone has excellent public transportation. And everyone uses it.

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

My approach would be to jack up vehicle registration fees. Simply doubling the vehicle registration cost every year over about 5 years would make individual car ownership expensive enough that people will really try to avoid it.

By the fifth year you're looking at about $5k per year just to legally own and operate a car on public roads, which is workable (most people pay more than that per year for their car loans) but it's more than enough to make any family think twice about owning more than one car, and more than enough to make not owning a car and just renting/taking public transit a super attractive option. Plus it's more than the cost of a mid-range e-bike so trading your car for an ebike becomes extremely cost effective with a break-even point measured in just months

5 years is also enough time to get roads reconfigured for the new traffic flow of mostly ebikes, get more buses in the roads and start planning/building out new train routes. There's an incredible rail network still in the US and just putting out more passenger services on the existing tracks that are presently freight-exclusive would make a massive difference

[–] quick_snail@feddit.nl 1 points 3 weeks ago

Two stroke engines in lawn care motors produce worse pollution than cars.

We need to increase the cost of gas. It's not just cars.

[–] quick_snail@feddit.nl 3 points 3 weeks ago

This is misleading.

Airplanes are worse not because of energy consumption per person, but because of carbon equivalent units are magnitudes higher when nitrogen oxides are burned at a high altitude.

[–] f314@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

For modes using electricity, losses during generation and distribution are included.

They should do this for the fossil fuel modes as well and see what that does to the numbers!

[–] helvetpuli@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 weeks ago

Why are those passenger numbers for the train so low? Here at least the railway moves something like 2000 passengers per vehicle on average. Over 3000 at peak times.

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 weeks ago

I’ve always thought that a 60 passenger bus with 2 people on it is never going to be as efficient as a car with 2 people. Probably closer to 2 cars with 1 each. And that’s a strikingly common situation in North America because they won’t buy a smaller bus and electric busses are still a dangerous concept for so many transit managers.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Speed is the problem for boats

[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 weeks ago

ooh interesting! Today I Learned

[–] vivalapivo@lemmy.today 1 points 3 weeks ago

what i find mind-blowing is that airplanes consume approximately the same amount of energy as cars

The same logic could be applied to spacecrafts. The energy efficiency of a spacecraft travelling to Mars is approximately 10-50MJ/100km - between a car and a bicycle. Should everyone take a ticket to Mars rather than driving their SUV to work?

[–] cornshark@lemmy.world 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

What's demand response?

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

It's a bonkers newish form of not-a-bus, often running passenger vans, usually operates where you either book your rides a day or two in advance or book with an app and wait 5-120 minutes for it to show up, and the service runs door to door.

They're ultimately super inefficient in the real world requiring an extremely high driver:passenger ratio to be at all competitive with bus services

Edit to add: it's basically the answer to "what if taxi replace bus?"

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

oh come off it, it's a great way to provide service in areas that are NEVER going to get proper bus lines otherwise.
We use it in most of sweden (as a fallback in rural areas) and it's perfectly functional.

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh yeah it makes perfect sense for very small towns and rural areas, but when a city with a population measured in the hundreds of thousands seriously tries to run a demand response transit system as literally it's entire transit system, it deserves more than this level of derision

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

right, but maybe americans can try to remember that actual rural areas (as in, something between the density of suburbia and wyoming) do exist, and that the entire world doesn't consist of 30 megacities in a desert? It's very frustrating to see perfectly valid modes of transport dismissed as bonkers and inefficient, when it demonstrably works okay in the right circumstances and enables 90% of my country to have any sort of public transport at all.

I see this kind of thing so often from americans, taking their personal experiences with public transport and their local conditions, and projecting that upon the entire concept of public transport as a whole.
Everything from "public transport is full of stinky druggies and is only for the truly desperate", to "the only form of public transport that exists is buses; trains and trams are ancient and irrelevant". And it's baffling because just looking at how things work in the rest of the world would immediately disabuse those notions.

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 points 3 weeks ago

Hey man, I get the frustration, but your frustration is misplaced. I presently live in a town of ~10k people, married a woman who grew up on a goat farm outside of a town of 700, I work in an unincorporated community of around 400. I just took a big vacation in which I rode about a dozen different transit systems, and I'm already planning the next one. I'm a freaking model railroader and I've been looking at potential adding a running model bus system to my model railroad as well.

Trust me I get what you're saying, I understand the exact frustrations you've expressed, I just ask you do the same for me