Home
»
Trains Magazine
»
Forums
»
Passenger
»
German Rail website showing environmental impact

Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
Amtrak offers comparative figures regarding fuel burns and emissions. It too shows that the train creates a lighter environmental footprint than cars and airplanes, although it is silent on intercity buses.  The intercity bus industry claims that it creates the lightest footprint.  All of the claimants, if I remember correctly, cite a variety of studies to support their claim.   Under ideal conditions, it makes sense that a passenger train, especially if it is powered by electric energy generated by nuclear, hydro, or wind, would be more fuel efficient and, therefore, create less pollution than a car, airplane or bus powered by fossil fuel.  All studies have to make model assumptions, i.e. fuel consumption, load factor, emissions, types of vehicles, etc.  Moreover, in most instances they are static.  They consider the here and now. I have not seen many of them that consider changing technologies. For example, new airplanes going into service in this country, as well as around the world, are considerably more fuel efficient and environmentally benign than the airplanes that they are replacing. So if the researcher uses American's current fleet of airplanes for comparative purposes, he or she will get a significantly different result than what can be expected a year or two from now when the MD80s are replaced.  The difference between what the lab based studies show and what actually happens on the ground can be different. Lets take the Trinity Railway Express (TRE). It is a commuter operation between Dallas and Fort Worth. Upon request Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) gave me the data for every TRE train.  I even got it on spreadsheets.  Amongst other things I was interested in the load factors on the trains. The results were as expected. During the morning and evening rush hours the trains had an average load factor of 80 to 85 per cent. However, during the early morning hours and late evening hours the average load factor was as low as 10 per cent. Overall, the average load factor was 30 to 35 per cent. Accordingly, the load factor used by the modelers to determine the environmental footprint of various modes of transport is critical to the outcome.  Is it the arithmetic average, geometric average, harmonic average, median, etc.?   Operationally the TRE runs as many as four cars per train during the morning and evening rush hours.  During the day the trains typically have two to three cars.  More importantly, however, the trains have a 25 minute dwell time in Fort Worth and Dallas at the end of each run. Whilst standing the engines pump out a considerable amount of pollution before heading back to the other end point. Is this taken into consideration by a researcher, especially one that is thousands of miles from DFW and may not have even heard of TRE? Amtrak has a similar problem.  Each Eagle spends more than an hour in Fort Worth being serviced.  Whilst there the engines continue to pump out emissions. Even worse is the Heartland Flyer.  It arrives in Fort Worth at 12:39 p.m.  The engines idle until the 5:25 p.m. departure for Oklahoma City.  Do the researchers take this into consideration when constructing their models? At the end of the day, however, whether trains are more environmentally benign than cars, planes, buses or horses is irrelevant. People in this part of the world want to travel by car.  Their cars are getting cleaner each year.  Many folks in the passenger advocacy group seem to think that the competing technologies will stand still whilst rail technology gets more efficient.  I would not count on it. Twenty five years from now we may see more passenger trains in Texas. If we do it will be because of congestion along the I-35 and I-45 corridors. It will not be because trains are cleaner than cars.  By then, according to many of the studies that I have read, cars will be much cleaner. There is a high probability that many of them will be electric or electric hybrids re-charged overnight with energy generated by Texas' growing nuclear energy capability.  Several posters to this thread have cited personal experiences to support their argument.  They project that experience onto the population as a whole.  Technically speaking, if one wants to project the results of a sample (one or many) to the population as a whole, he needs to take a valid statistical sample.  One's personal experience does not constitute in most instances a valid statistical sample. My analysis of the TRE was based on the whole population. It was not a sample.
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag