I see no technologies on the horizon to improve electric train efficiencies to anything like the degree that hybrid, plug-in hybrid and other new automobile technologies have the potential to improve the efficiency of cars over the next 20 or 30 years. Furthermore, since we do virtually all of our traveling by car and very little by electric train, improving the efficiency of cars provides vastly greater potential for reducing energy consumption and emissions than improving the efficiency of electric trains. Cars provide more than 95% of passenger-miles of surface transportation in the United States. Electric trains, far less than 1%. Why on earth should we make improving the efficiency of electric trains a priority when the potential savings from such an improvement are so tiny?

As for converting the auto fleet to electric cars, where do you think all that extra electricity is going to come from, especially considering that peak oil and GHG regulation will be putting an ever tighter squeeze on generation?

From the same sources it comes from now, but hopefully with a greater share coming from cleaner and renewable sources. I don’t understand the point of the question. Whether we’re traveling by electric cars or electric transit, the electricity is going to have to come from somewhere.

And hydrogen hybrids — really? Last I heard it takes electricity to make hydrogen, or you strip it from methane (a.k.a. natural gas, which we are running out of) in a process that releases CO2. Fuel cells may be efficient, but supplying the hydrogen, not so much.

Not hydrogen hybrids. Hydrogen-powered electric cars that use fuel cells to convert the hydrogen into electricity. The cars themselves will produce zero pollution. The hydrogen will probably be centrally-generated through a process that is much cleaner than burning gasoline in car engines, and then transported to fuel stations. At least, that is the idea. Most analysts seem to believe that hydrogen is the long-term future of automobile technology. But perhaps it will be superadvanced batteries instead. Or something else. We don’t know at this point. For the near-term future, new auto tech will probably be dominated by hybrid and plug-in hybrid systems, and perhaps biofuels.

And yes, as you claim (over and over), based on current average ridership in the U.S, buses are only about 1/3 more efficient per passenger-mile than the average car. But why do you assume this trend is frozen forever in time? Compact development will lead to higher ridership.

Higher ridership is not the same thing as higher efficiency. Efficiency is a matter of the distribution of demand, not the total amount of demand. As long as demand continues to vary dramatically across different bus routes and route segments, and across different times of the day and different days of the week, efficiency will be limited. And we’ve been over the issue of compact development in another thread. It just doesn’t offer any realistic potential for meaningful reductions in our total energy consumption and emissions.

JB, this is a blog about urban planning in Seattle.

This post is not about Seattle. It’s about CO2 emissions from different modes of transportation. The other posts I have been commenting on are not about Seattle specifically, either.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=better-battery-lithium-ion-cell-gets-supercharged

As for converting the auto fleet to electric cars, where do you think all that extra electricity is going to come from, especially considering that peak oil and GHG regulation will be putting an ever tighter squeeze on generation? And hydrogen hybrids — really? Last I heard it takes electricity to make hydrogen, or you strip it from methane (a.k.a. natural gas, which we are running out of) in a process that releases CO2. Fuel cells may be efficient, but supplying the hydrogen, not so much.

And yes, as you claim (over and over), based on current average ridership in the U.S, buses are only about 1/3 more efficient per passenger-mile than the average car. But why do you assume this trend is frozen forever in time? Compact development will lead to higher ridership. We don’t even need to improve the mechanical efficiency of buses to get big improvements — going from 25% to 75% full buses would triple the efficiency. There are many ways we be more efficient running transit and capture more riders — we basically suck at transit in the U.S. cause we’ve never tried very hard. Compact development addresses the root of the problem: it enables shorter trips, and travel modes that are inherently more efficient than an SOV.

People who are retiring will still love their suburbs, and I am fine with that. But I can’t imagine those people as the working commuters of the next few decades.

I know quite a bit about Seattle. But I’m not sure why you think any of the arguments I have been making depend on knowledge of Seattle in particular, anyway.

To predict the future, I’d say rising energy costs and flatlining road funding will very likely lead more Americans to “work and shop close to our homes, and do most of our traveling by public transportation or by walking/bicycling rather than by private car.”

Well, maybe, but not on the scale needed to make a meaningful difference to CO2 emissions. We went over this in another thread. And so far, there’s no real evidence of any trend towards higher density. Most of the growth is occurring in car-oriented suburbs.

We have been through a few iterations now. There are still original discrete towns that pre-exist the auto that served as local centers. We have the rise of large cities. We saw the decline of those cities as nice places to live, along with the rise of suburban communtities. After WWII, suburbs became largely places the Mom and kids had the good life while Dad commuted to the city. They were much denser than what we see now, walkable and had their own commercial life. Bad part was they did not have mass transit. Good part was a lot of people could walk to stuff, and driving to the grocery store was a matter of driving one or two miles instead of the long trips we now take in Seattle to the Costco (or Renton or Bellevue).

Of course I am ignoring the reality of anyone either very rich or very poor in this picture.

Then we see the attempts to make center cities ‘great places’ to live, more mass transit systems that all go downtown, but at the same time much more suburban building of office parks, strip malls and subdivisions where 4000-5000 sq ft homes are not uncommon.

This sort of regional and national development has continued well past it’s ’shelf life’, especially when all parents are commuting hither and yon, separated from thier home life. Even considering that families are smaller or people are just not having children, commutes are further and longer.

It just makes me cringe that builders have gotten away with building 5000sqft homes for childless couples in the last 20 years where we used to have farms. And, jurisdictions happily build the roads. This is true everywhere. It’s particularly disgusting to see a brand new road go for miles and miles past farms to a new subdivision. And, those people believe they now live in the country. It just happened to be a farm that some developer bought and got the locals to agree to rezone and build a road.

There are ways with land use laws and taxes that would stop this stuff. But, these laws need to supecede jurisdictional interests. Bad news is that it should have been stopped a long time ago. If we took the word development out of our vocabulary, maybe developers would not have a place at the planning table.

Now we talk about buses versus rail and try to guilt people about where they live. The point is that we need to STOP building in places that are not built, and we need to dense up suburban towns. Turn that office park into multi-use. Turn that 5000 sqft home into a home for two households. For example, my sister is putting four generations into her house since she hated it when her husband unilaterally decided that they had to have the huge house, but she is just skirting the legal side of her zoning laws. Work with where we have built, infill retail where people live and houses where we work.

Will we be driving and needing mass transit? I believe both will be true. Can we be driving less distances on a regular basis and using more transit between these nodes? As long as we STOP building in new places, otherwise all other discussion is futile.

By the way, the amount of infill we need is to support about 1% more people per year based on the info I saw that King County grew 10% since 2000. That does not require a huge tear down-build new effort IMHO