The issue will those CO2 estimations is always the same: what is counted it, and what is not. For example, are the CO2 emissions related to the maintenance of the railroad counted in? On the other hand, are the CO2 emissions related to the production of the imported parts of the electric cars are also counted in? And so on.
And the reason I propose this question is because the argument sounds like green-washing. For example, where I live it is often much cheaper to travel *by air* than by a train even on relatively short distances (<1000km). So if the final cost is correlated at least a bit with the CO2 emissions, which kind of makes sense in a general case (does it?), there is a problem with the CO2 emissions estimate there.
What I am saying is that the problem with CO2 emissions is real, but it is being abused (green washing, etc.) in the absence of a commonly accepted and well understood way of estimating them. And the worst thing about it is that it makes the entire topic more ambiguous for everyone, stirs the speculations (people even denying that the problem exists) and makes it harder to focus on working solutions.
We should work to convert every process that uses energy to green energy. Then the issue becomes moot. Make everything electric, make all electricity production renewable (or nuclear). For things that can't easily run off of batteries like intercontinental flights, use electricity to produce methane or ethanol, and accept that this is a lossy process, price it accordingly.
AFAIK, one of the things that produces the most CO2, and that we're not doing very much about (or even discussing) just yet, is the production of concrete.
thing is, you can't beat oil energy density. And its logistic. going 100% electric is really something big, maybe too big.
A good exemple is synthetic fuel: in Germany, they have really hard issues on biomass collect which is needed for "green fuel". As of today, synthesis come from coal.
And we're talking about Germany,not France.
France, who would need to triple its production of electricity to replace its oil consumption from cars.
and I did not talked about the cropland needed for "biogas" and ethanol fuel.
concrete, steel, agro-industry too...the list is long.
This is why I said we can use electricity to produce ethanol or methanol.
> France, who would need to triple its production of electricity to replace its oil consumption from cars.
That seems very doubtful. Do some napkin math. A Tesla Model 3 long range has a ~75KWh battery pack. That gives it an EPA range of ~550KM. If you assume that the average person drives 1/3 of that every day (generous), there's no way that you need to triple electric production to cover that.
> AFAIK, one of the things that produces the most CO2, and that we're not doing very much about (or even discussing) just yet, is the production of concrete.
I don't think that's true, I've seen it discussed quite a bit. It's just that there isn't an 'easy' fix, i.e. there isn't a replacement ready to go like there is with electricity production, discounting costs. Same goes for other industrial processes,
As more of a fun idea than an argument in either direction: to make it even more ambiguous and complex, what CO2 does one emit in attaining the money to use either option? In theory, the CO2 I produce to buy an EV is capped - not so for trains, as I'll always need to buy a ticket. My rough maths says I'll take a train ride every day for 20 years before they balance. Real hard to reconcile all the factors at play but definitely interesting.
"Electric cars produce twice as much CO2 as trains."
Perhaps the comparision being made in the submission is not between, e.g., air and rail, but between individual transport, i.e., automobile, and shared transport, i.e., public transportation, e.g., trains.
In the aggregate, does individual transport releases less CO2 than individual transport. Why does shared transport, and in particular, public transport, even exist. Perhaps the idea predates environmental concerns.
Valid point, when considering lifetime emissions (with rolling stock and tracks) CO2e for trains roughly doubles. But then you should also consider emissions for making and maintaining roads, charging stations (including their infrastructure),...
I saw one analysis that explained the sometimes-higher cost of rail travel. It concluded that the problem was labor costs. A longer duration requires more hours of labor. This would go against the CO2 assumption.
When people "trade-in" a gas car for an EV, those gas cars are usually re-sold to peripheral countries with less regulations, where they continue running on dirtier fuel [1]. The emissions of the gas car continue, plus the embodied emissions of buying a new gas car and the ongoing emissions from the fossil fuel sources of electric charging.
Vehicles that weigh 4,000 pounds, primarily designed to move 250 pounds of people, are inefficient by design — there will never be enough materials or energy on Earth to change that. This will continue showing itself in pollution and other externalities, such as the significant microplastic pollution that comes from car tires [2], and the fact that EVs — which wear through tires faster — are making rubber one of the leading sources of Amazon deforestation [3.]
Of course, if you want to see solutions — they are buried all around us in North America, and exist all around us in many other parts of the world [4]. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in realizing solutions together, or just want to learn more. Contact in profile.
Nice initiative. Particularly for civilians doing daily activities, biking and walking seem like the best forms of transportation. They enhance personal happiness, increase community connections, make streets safer, and promote beautiful surroundings.
Thank you for the kind words! I would agree — and I think there are some more fundamental approaches, like housing density paired with in-fill of retail and shops, that can make that more accessible from the ground up. Literally!
Your suggestion of housing density with retail and shops fits the description of my current neighborhood. I love it so much that I changed careers to find ways to support more of this kind of community.
Whenever I see this kind of syllogism, I think it's fossil fuel propaganda. "Cars using electricity made by emitting CO2 cause CO2 to be emitted". Yeah, but that's not the car's fault, is it.
If you don't like your energy source, change your energy source. Don't give me this "washing machines emit more CO2 than handwashing" crap.
> Average fuel costs would be roughly £50 for a small petrol car to travel the 400 miles, and significantly less again for an electric car, even after recent energy price rises.
This isn't a fair comparison though. You need to insure the driver/car. You need to purchase the car. You need to pay to store the car when not in use. You are using up part of the car on the journey, which companies full well understand as they depreciate the car.
My impression is that Britain's rail industry has some major problems with poor management, high cost, and low quality of service, which it might better spend its time addressing...
Or if you want "X times better!" bragging rights - compared the microplastics released per passenger-mile by rail, vs. any sort of modern automobile.
The article talks about a "detailed analysis by rail industry", but doesn't link to or even mentions the title of the report. Which analysis are they talking about exactly?
Kind of unsurprising that steel on steel transfers energy better into forward momentum. I am curious how the footprint is for subways in big cities. Full trains, cost efficiency and ease of use should be way better there.
Cars and trains serve complementary needs. They do not function as replacements for each other as is implicit in this comparison.
Trains tend to go to places of high population density. Their stops are at places where many other people want to go all the time. And their schedule to go to these places is not in the traveler's control. Cars go pretty much everywhere (or to a close enough point) and do it on your whim. But they are not fun to use in high population density areas (parking, traffic, etc).
> Trains tend to go to places of high population density.
Trains go to lots of places with low population density actually. Its only America brain that somehow believes that trains are only something for city with millions.
I lived in a village with a few 1000 people and there were regular trains in multiple direction, and it wasn't on a major express line between major cities or anything. That train line then goes on to connect villages with even fewer people.
> Cars go pretty much everywhere (or to a close enough point) and do it on your whim.
Sure if somebody built a road there. And if there are gas stations/charging. And if there is no traffic. And if you both can drive and are allowed to drive. And so on and so on.
True freedom is not having to pay basically anything for 8 month (at most a small part of your taxes), then spur of the moment being able to say 'you know what, I want to go to the other side of the country cross a river and go up a mountain' then getting up and within 5 minutes being on public transport efficiently traveling to that location.
And this freedom is provided to you if you are 15 or 85. If you are blind. If you have were unable to perform your driving exams.
My home is connected to the rest of the world by roads, at maximum I can travel by air (but having no chopper, STOL or human-capable drone I can't take that route) so well... If someone can made ANY actual road link available by rails...
Oh, BTW my BEV can also run on not much hard ground, a thing trains can't do.
We have roads because so far they are the best balance between flexibility and available tech, we can't make rails everywhere and we can't makes them flexible enough to be used by many different transports. The future will be air, when we will been able technologically to lift enough weight and move at an affordable enough costs. That's is.
Rails today are the best on-ground means of transport for goods, for mass transports but can't reach "the last mile". Boats are another very nice means of transport BUT we do not have water everywhere so similar to rails have a scalability issue.
If I recall correctly, when everything ran on petrol and diesel, it was said that a single-occupancy car emitted 5x as much CO2 as riding a packed ("efficient") train. That this ratio has dropped from 5x to 2x says to me that electric cars have gotten a lot more efficient (more aerodynamic designs, which helps increase range).
Neither trains nor cars emit CO2. Electricity generation emits CO2. Trains and cars are completely irrelevant, and conveniently shift the debate away from "our power generation still emits CO2".
Do you expect a perfectly built out rail system to just spawn? No of course you need to start somewhere and articles like these are one argument to do so.
It matters if adoption is at all important, which we can all agree it is. If the alternative is that you take trains between cities and bike everywhere else, that's a lovely dream to have, but it's not going to persuade people to give up their cars. To do an apples-to-apples comparison a solution relying on trains would have to do everything a solution involving electric cars can do (and, to be fair, vice versa).
That depends on your priorities. For example, not sitting in traffic is a nice capability as is the ability to eat dinner and have a beer on the way home. Anyone under retirement age should also value the capability not to make the world worse, too.
They're more capable in some ways. They can go a lot faster than cars, and they allow passengers to engage in a much wider range of activities while riding one.
It's possible for a train to go faster than cars but it's not guaranteed. for example, one of the most heavily traveled corridors is Boston to New York City travel times are:
as for a wider range of activities, only if you don't get motion sick. When I'm on a train, my only activity is staring out the window (and taking pee breaks)
I can't imagine your point. Maybe you should clarify what it us, because the US is full of metros that would be extremely well served by modern train systems, and they would only grow as a result.
You suffer from the delusion that the way the US housing works is 'natural' and the result of the 'desire' of the population.
But this isn't really the case. Suberbia was is a created artificial environment propped up by massive subsidies and supported with lots of other policies, on the local, state and national level.
Sure its easy to live further out in suberbia because the friendly government plowed threw a minority neighborhood so you can have a highway to downtown. Those people not wanting highways across where they lived was not considered when people wanted to have a lawn. And of course those nice lawn didn't even pay for the highway either.
The US was built for and with the train. And by 1940 US cities were not very different from cities in other places. In the 1950s something crazy happened and pretty much all of a sudden every town sprawled out 5x as far as it did the previous 200 years despite population growth being slower then before. But I guess that was just totally natural as people wanted larger yards.
> by 1940 US cities were not very different from cities in other places
And people didnt like it
> In the 1950s something crazy happened
This was the response to not liking crowded cities while having access to cars
> Suberbia was is a created artificial environment propped up by massive subsidies and supported with lots of other policies, on the local, state and national level.
Sure, but those subsidies arent going away because the people who benefit have political power. The highways arent going away either.
I certainly dont think suburbia is "natural." It absolutely is the result of the desire of the population though.
I read this sentence more like this, "And people didnt like it because the marketing told them they'd like the suburbs better".
In Japan, people will not stay in the countryside / suburbs, young people do everything they can to move to cities. There is absolutely zero marketing, they just find cities attractive. More money, better careers, better social scene. This is why I disagree that it's "natural" because if it was true, why are cities so popular in Asia?
Cities have existed for a very long time and people love living in them.
Most people I know live in Suburbs because the idea of investing in property is considered a wise one, and buying a house in the suburbs is a way to get into property ownership at a more affordable level, not because living in a suburb is a romantic idea.
Rural living is a different thing altogether though.
That just false and even if it was true Suberbia wasnt the right answer and yet that is the answer that was politically picked.
> This was the response to not liking crowded cities while having access to cars
No it was a response to massive amount of government intervention and racism. Public housing and other subsidies were given in huge quantities to enable that type of development. And at the same time massive investment was put into widing roads, building highways and so on.
At the same time that was happening you had zoning and redlining. Redlining destroyed or harmed investment in the city centers. And zoning made continous development outright illigal.
So your whole stick of 'its all just naturally because of people desires' is just factually wrong.
> Sure, but those subsidies arent going away because the people who benefit have political power.
And they certintly wont go away if people like you contine to spread lies and propganda. And it wont go away if the people who live in the poor neiberhoods or the city proper don't even know they are being exploted.
And they wont go away unless cities start to correctly account for the cost of the development they are persuing.
Many cities are bankrupt and that a direct result of bad development patterns that dont pay for themselves.
But the thing is highways can actually go away. Removal of Urban highways has been a thing, many have done it and more communities want to do it. Go and actually inform yourself.
At the same time many town actually try to understand their finances and try to figure out how they can develop a real urban center and have sustainable development.
Go look at the work of Urban3 is you want see the real finacial data.
Opinions change over time. Of course not all highways will go away. And of course some people will want to live in suberbia even they had to pay their own cost.
However neiter of those things mean that baseline policy should or couldn't change.
You can look at all sorts of metrics indicating this change is happening.
An attitude of things are as they are because of the inherent unchangable desires of the population and thus things can never change is the kind of argument I would not expect on HN.
> It absolutely is the result of the desire of the population though.
Governemnt sububsidy lead to a situation where it was cheaper to get a loan and buy a house in the suburbs compared to even public housing in the city. Of course only for white people, Jews, Negros, Asians and even some italians were excluded.
So the minorities pay for everything a lot and dont get any investment, the. redlined and destroyed their neiberhood and they could even privatly invest. Then everybody realized that living in the suburbs was shit and all the jobs and entertainment was in the city. So you plowed a highway threw the minority communities so Joe Miller can drive to his job threw the former minority neiberhood.
But yeah that outcome is what 'the people' wanted and therefore its totally and exactly what should have happen.
Do you not realize what the problem with your whole narrative is?
> Do you not realize what the problem with your whole narrative is?
In terms of justice or whatnot sure. But the world isnt fair. Arguments based on fairness will never work. Americans do not want to live like the japanese, they want to be in suburbia. And they have the political power to make that happen, so it will.
You thinking I said highways cant go away makes it hard to believe youre talking to me in good faith. Obviously they can, but they wont, because voters dont want them to. And they never will in the vast majority of the US.
> An attitude of things are as they are because of the inherent unchangable desires of the population and thus things can never change is the kind of argument I would not expect on HN.
I certainly dont think desires are unchangeable. I just realize that Americans deeply value personal space and there is absolutely no change of desires anywhere on the horizon, however much you and I may wish there was. Things change when people want them to, but most americans do not want suburbia to change.
> Americans do not want to live like the japanese, they want to be in suburbia.
Because 40 years of policies have made that the primary option and most Americans don't even understand other forms of living. They think of urban as New York City or poor cheap Appartements where poor people live.
You literally have made alternative forms of living illigal in most of the US, thus most people don't even have the option.
The few places that do exist with good urbanism generally are very expensive and often can be expanded because of zoning laws and other legal issues.
> I just realize that Americans deeply value personal space
Funny how somehow Americans weren't that special in valuing social space into the 1930s and then somehow starting in the later 30 and then increasingly in the 50/60 they did. Crazy continence that this happened right at the same time as a massive state drive to subsidize that style of living. Its almost like its not inherent but rather constructed.
Funny how living in Russian cities and living in US cities in the 1920 weren't that difference and then the two states started subsidizing/legally mandating radically different models. And then, just by coincidence I'm sure, most Americans mostly now live exactly like US government policy wanted and most former Soviet people live exactly like Soviet policy wanted.
So your explanation for this that some how around 1920-1930 the US and Soviet culture radically changed and all of a sudden US culture preferred more space and Soviet culture preferred modernism. Crazy, its almost like culture responses to incentives and laws.
Most people always preferred to have space. It just wasnt plausible before mass market cars, so people suffered in the cities. Of courts plenty like you and me prefer urban living, but the vast majority do not. We absolutely should look at policy that makes urban living easier and cheaper, but dont delude yourself that anywhere close to most people want to live like that.
People also prefer to fly in personal helicopters.
Simply because people like something doesn't mean it happens. The world has constraints.
And those constraints negotiate between what people want and what makes sense in the real world.
When you literally steam roll the constraints, make alternatives worse and literally flatten whole parts of cities to make things happen. Then that not a simply outcome of 'desire for more space'.
Roads in subburbs aren't so absurdly large because of a desire for more space. Absurdly oversized lawns aren't actually that practical or useful (not to mention costly and environmental disaster).
Your story of 'space above all else' simply doesn't hold up. Yes people want space, but they also want lots of other things. Its a balance. And if you do radical intervention to shift the balance you influence the result.
The simply reality is that one of the driving forces of many suburban developments was that it was simply illegal for black people to move there. In fact, after a wguke prices in parts of the city were so low that you could get a whole lot more space for not so much money. And yet still many people moved to suberbia.
Its almost as if massive investment in on thing and massive disinvestment in the other leads to people wanting to move where the investment is.
I agree. Bad urban planning is endemic in the US. We need to do better. However, we've got what we've got, and the correct solution for that is more electric cars and better urban planning, which is going to take a LONG time to have positive effect.
I agree that we need electric cars but I think it’s a mistake to think of urban planning as needing to have such long gone scale. Some things are slow like planning rail lines but other things can be quick if you have the courage to do things like what Paris or London have done. An express bus lane is paint and cameras on the buses to punish scofflaws. A good bike lane needs physical barriers but a quick build design converting a parking or traffic lane is very fast - what makes it slow is the insistence that not a single parking spot be lost or driver forced to go only the speed limit.
Make it easy to build ADUs or upsize detached single family houses and you can double the number of people living in many neighborhoods in a decade or less simply by not preventing existing demands.
Good. If we want cleaner air and quieter cities, we have several alternatives to gasoline cars. I imagine a graph of CO₂ production goes a bit like this:
Walk -
Bike -
Train ------
Electric Car ------------
Gasoline Car ------------------------------
On the one hand, it seems silly to debate electric cars versus trains while we have gasoline cars on the streets. On the other hand, I like that we focus our news on the low emitters, so gasoline cars drop out of popular culture. To change a paradigm, it helps to speak with assurance from the new one.
The article seems to be looking at marginal CO2 production, so that's what I'll look at. To be precise, let's consider this situation: you want to go from your present position at point A to some other point B. There's a nice road from A to B, which is suitable for walking, biking, and driving. There's also a train track beside the road with stations at A and B. You already own and regularly use a bike, an ICE car, and an EV.
The question then is if you take a trip from A to B, which choice from {walk, bike, train, ICE, EV} will result in the lowest change in total atmospheric CO2 from the time you leave A to the time you arrive in B?
Let's first just look at walking vs biking. Perhaps surprisingly you will actually produce more CO2 walking. Here's a site [1] with some example calculations. Their example is a trip of 3.2 km, with a walking speed of 4.8 km/hr and a biking speed of 12.8 km/hr.
Walking would take 40 minutes and burn 167 kCal, but just being at rest for 40 minutes would burn 56 kCal so we should count walking as costing 111 kCal.
Biking would be 15 minutes and burn 70 kCal, but just being at rest for 15 minutes would burn 21 kCal so we should biking as costing 49 kCal.
We produce about 0.7 kg of CO2 per 2000 kCal, so that gives 0.03885 kg CO2 for walking and 0.01715 kg CO2 for biking.
But wait...should any of that actually be included? The C in the CO2 we exhale comes from the C in the food we eat. For plants we eat they get it from atmospheric CO2. For animals we eat they get it from the food they eat, and so on with it also ultimately coming from plants that get it from CO2 in the atmosphere.
That's just contributing to fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 levels, not to an increase over time in CO2 levels. The question asked above probably should have not been about the lowest change in total atmospheric CO2 over the time of the trip but about the lowest change in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that had not recently been in the atmosphere before the trip.
How to count the train is also unclear. The most straightforward way would be to figure the energy the train has to expend for the trip and divide it by the number of passengers, then attribute to each passenger the CO2 from producing that energy.
But the train is still going to make that trip regardless of whether or not you decide to take it. One could argue that for this comparison we should be looking at how much additional energy the train uses if you are on it compared to if you are not. That's going to be very small, and the corresponding CO2 is going to be very small even if the train gets it energy from fossil fuels.
You can get a situation where if you have a dirty activity and a clean activity you only actually come out ahead if enough people switch to the clean activity so that the dirty activity can end.
This is something to watch out for. It can lead to cases where the rational behavior is to advocate for the discontinuation of something on environmental grounds but to personally continue to do/use that thing until regulation or economics make it stop. Some people mistake that for hypocrisy but it is not.
If the train is an electric train and it has a clean source of electricity it might be down near walking and biking.
Similar for the EV. If it has a clean electricity source, it too might be down there near walking and biking. If we are including exhaled CO2 it could actually be lower if it has 100% green electricity because your kCal burn rate in the car should be the same as your at rest burn rate.
The ICE car is going to be way up there.
In summary I think then it would be bike and walk very low or even zero, ICE car very high, EV anywhere between walk/bike and maybe 80% of ICE car depending on its electric source, and train somewhere between EV and walk/bike again depending on electric source (assuming EV train).
Thanks for the thorough analysis. In British Columbia, and specifically where I live, much of our electricity comes from hydro electric, we have suitable pathways-with-boulevards for walking, and the streets have segregated or low traffic bike lanes. That leave us with an almost idyllic situation for walking, biking, and EVs. Not only does that support a reduction in my CO2 production, but also it support my personal well-being with neighbors, exposure to nature, and exercise.
The other great thing about rail is it takes up much less space, and where it does exist it generally doesn't create an impermeable layer above the underlying soil.
I was wondering about this last night. Fungi make up a large amount of soil mass and sequester a lot of CO2. If we cover a large area in concrete, do we lose this benefit by essentially killing the fungi beneath?
A lot of commenters seem to be Americans working from the idea trains are diesel. The majority of British trains are fully electric. This the argument is moot. Yes it’s much more efficient to move 1,000 people with one big engine than to break them into pairs and use 500 smaller engines.
Yeah and if those cars are self-driving, it's fairly easy to have an Uber type service that puts together shared rides on the fly. Such a service would:
1. Cost less
2. Be faster
3. More convenient
4. Door to door
I think trains are finished except maybe some very high speed routes.
It’s all great when you don't count in that China and US combined are responsible for 45% of ALL emissions in the world. There is an old dark joke in Russia. “ - Dad, vodka has risen in price, you will drink less?! - No, son, you will eat less.”
And it’s kinda funny as both China and USA aren’t really cutting emissions to fight climate change, but push all other countries to do all the legwork. Whe news outlets argue what are worse cows or goats farts, electric cars or electric trains and so on. Just pure hypocrisy tbh.
Yeah, that's true, but underground rail is $4b/mi in San Francisco and a used Tesla Model 3 is $27k so you could get 5.4 used Teslas per San Francisco resident for the cost of one mile of rail. It's a cost issue.
I think that's an American problem though. The fact that our electric cars have to be so big is another thing. We're just not winning on cost and feasibility.
Besides that, I did pretty fine with just an e-bike, in the last year that I lived in the Bay Area.
Your math is wrong - it's $4B ÷ 815k residents ÷ $27k = 0.18 used Tesla Model 3s per resident. (you accidentally used 27k as both the price and the population)
In my defence, my degree is in Mathematics, so I was guaranteed to fuck up the arithmetic. Thank you for catching that. Should have smelled the order of magnitude :)
That's just an terrible comparison. Tesla aren't gravity less chickens hover in a vacuum.
For Tesla to run you need roads, you need charging infrastructure, you need energy infrastructure and so on and so on. Not to mention that if you actually bought that many 'used' Model 3s the price would go up. Not to mention the huge amount of people who currently do not have a car, who all of a sudden would make the bad traffic (and everything associated with that) worse.
And guess what, the 'rail' would be 100x cheaper if some of the cars were moved of the road, and the rail was moved on that right of way. How about you do a cost comparison where the rail gets the existing right of way, and all those Tesla have to go into a tunnel. The way you phrase your whole proposition is already incredibly loaded.
The cost are so high literally because the San Francisco people who propose this stuff are bunch of Tesla driving asshats who don't undrestand the first thing about public transport. They make projects incredibly expensive because (a) they don't give a shit about the plebs who have to use it and (b) the bigger the project the better the politics of handing out money to people.
By any estimation, for a society as a whole having an efficient public transport system is by far a win. Everybody who has actually done any real analysis of the 'lets buy everybody a car' 'solution' will come to the conclusion that its incredibly dumb. Its just something far right wing people bring up to continue to prevent actual progress.
Where is the train that is reachable from my house that will take me to work in the same 15-25 minutes driving takes without making me wait in the cold or rain.
Every time I used a train in the UK on a weekend I had to ride in a diesel bus for part of the journey. I doubt if that is less co2 emitting than driving my electric car.
Yeah exactly, a private car being only 2X the emissions of public transportation is actually pretty good. Electricity can eventually be 100% clean anyway. Gasoline will never be clean.
"Using a diesel or petrol car produced nine times more carbon than going by train.
The figure was four times more polluting than a train if driving a plug-in hybrid electric car, or almost two-and-a-half times more if using a battery electric car."
In other words, water is wet. Cars by design are less efficient when it comes to long distance travel. But trains cannot and will not be able to solve the "last mile problem" or even the "last 5 miles" problem when the cities are just massive urban sprawls.
EVs are still better than regular cars and we can have them coexist with better planned cities and public transportation.
Light rail, streetcars, pantograph buses and smart urban design can solve the rest of those problems. Toronto and Vancouver have used these solutions to solve these problems in relatively sprawling North American cities.
I honestly thought it would be way worse. Trains are not as fast or practical for the average trip, so if they're only twice as efficient it's not good for trains, especially since cars efficiency is likely to improve better than trains
Honestly, that is amazing. Trains are ludicrously efficient. If I was within a factor of 10 of them but I could offer end to end transport anywhere I would shout it from the rooftops.
The article "explains" why EVs are better than trains. When you are going to spin something, do the job properly. Ideally, journos don't look like prats, regurgitating the usual nonsense.
Headline: EVs produce twice as much CO2 as trains.
It all comes down to definitions. Do we include the cost of rail/road construction? That's rather complicated. My EV ...
And the reason I propose this question is because the argument sounds like green-washing. For example, where I live it is often much cheaper to travel *by air* than by a train even on relatively short distances (<1000km). So if the final cost is correlated at least a bit with the CO2 emissions, which kind of makes sense in a general case (does it?), there is a problem with the CO2 emissions estimate there.
What I am saying is that the problem with CO2 emissions is real, but it is being abused (green washing, etc.) in the absence of a commonly accepted and well understood way of estimating them. And the worst thing about it is that it makes the entire topic more ambiguous for everyone, stirs the speculations (people even denying that the problem exists) and makes it harder to focus on working solutions.