No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Reprinted from The Antiplanner

Most light-rail lines use as much or more energy per passenger mile as an average SUV, and many emit more pounds of CO2 per passenger mile than the average automobile. Moreover, the energy efficiency and CO2 emissions of automobiles are steadily improving, while the energy efficiency of both bus and rail transit are declining. Thus, cities that want to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions would do better to encourage auto drivers to buy more fuel-efficient cars than to build rail transit lines.

Those are the main conclusions of the Antiplanner’s new Cato paper, “Does Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” While some rail transit operations are energy and CO2 efficient, the energy and CO2 costs of construction overwhelm any savings. Thus, from an environmental viewpoint, rail transit is almost always a bad investment.

Longtime readers of the Antiplanner will recognize that this paper is based on blog posts from last August. The paper corrects some errors pointed out by faithful readers, most importantly by accurately accounting for the CO2 emissions from local sources of energy. The paper also points out several ways of reducing CO2 emissions that are far more cost effective than even the best rail lines.

Curiously, after I was done writing the Cato report, I discovered that UC Irvine economist Charles Lave said almost exactly the same thing way back in 1979. Public transportation is not particularly energy efficient, he wrote, and spending huge sums of money on transit will not attract many people out of their cars. If we want to save energy, he concluded, it makes more sense to encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars than to invest in transit.

Since Lave wrote, the average energy efficiency of both passenger cars and light trucks has increased, a response to high fuel prices. Meanwhile, the average energy efficiency of both buses and rail transit have declined, probably because the transit industry has extended both bus and rail service to areas where they are little used. So what Lave wrote in 1979 is now more true than ever.

Yet many people still believe the myth that spending a lot of money on transit will save energy. This shows how hard it is to kill such misconceptions, especially when they are promoted by a wealthy lobby and supported by many planners decades after economists like Lave have disproven them.

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Rail Transit Contributes to Global Warming

Apr 14

2008

Update: Fixed links to paper.