What is the Most Efficient Mode of Transportation?
The advent of smart cars can solve many problems, including an increase in traffic density for faster commutes, the promise of increased safety (due to better roadway decision making), and driver convenience. Electric and hydrogen cars promise cleaner energy, but rubber tire to road is still a relatively high-friction and inefficient means of transportation, requiring high energies to overcome rolling resistance. What, you may ask, is the most efficient and energy saving form of transportation in terms of passenger miles per btu? (the standard for measuring transportation energy efficiency). The answers may surprise you!
Some of the answers lie in the table below, in energy measured by the number of btus per passenger mile (a btu is an international measure of energy…don’t worry, you’ll see by the relative values which mode is more efficient) and wherever relevant, we show the equivalent “miles per gallon” of the mode (this is tricky because “people walking” uses caloric joules and obviously not gasoline, plus efficiencies of the transportation device come into play so that joules/m and mpg are sort of apples and oranges).
