The new electric trains will buy electricity only from zero-emission sources, according to Caltrain spokesperson Dan Lieberman. These numbers sound very positive, until you step back and consider their actual meaning, namely that the old diesel caltrain was using many times more fuel than its passengers would have burned if they each drove private SUVs, and that the train in general is hugely inefficient.
This is surprising, as the common public perception is that trains are more energy efficient than cars, and the initial instinct is to consider public transit as the greener choice. The math says otherwise, and in the case of Caltrain, it says it overwhelmingly.
Caltrain’s Great New Electric Trains Replace Heavy Polluters (forbes.com)
The reason trains – and buses – are seldom as efficient as claimed, is that much of the time, they have many empty seats. Think of a commuter bus from the suburbs to downtown. The bus starts empty and gradually fills up with passengers, in the morning commute and is probably near full at the downtown destination. But the bus turns around, now empty, at 8 am, and heads back to the suburbs, traveling mostly empty all the way until the cycle repeats. Same thing with commuter rail.
Mass transit is only efficient when full – but much or even most of the day, trains and buses have few passengers.
Airliners do not typically have this problem. Let’s say a plane flies from Portland to Salt Lake City and delivers a nearly full load of passengers. That plane probably does not immediately return to Portland, but picks up a new load of passengers and continues on to Los Angeles, unloads, and then loads a new group of LAX fliers headed to Portland. The aircraft does not return to its origin immediately but goes only wo where another full load of passengers are ready to travel.
Pretty much everything “experts” tell us turns out to be wrong – and probably harmful too. Remember when the experts said you needed a Covid-19 vaccination to prevent becoming infected? (That turned out not be true – at all.)
