Login / RegisterDavid Suzuki: On the road to reduced fuel use
Cars and trucks are among the biggest contributors to the heat-trapping emissions that cause global warming. About 12 percent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions come from private automobiles, and up to a quarter come from road transportation in general. That makes driving a good place to start in confronting one of the most serious challenges humans face.
Canada and the U.S. just announced plans to enact fuel-efficiency standards for new cars and light trucks manufactured in the two countries. Canada is expected to match the U.S. standards, which will require all cars and trucks built by a company to get an average of about 35 miles per gallon, or six litres per 100 kilometres, by 2016. Canada’s government estimates that will lead to a 25 percent reduction in vehicle emissions in 2016 compared to 2008. The government’s next step should be to require more zero-emission vehicles powered by clean-energy sources.
The new-vehicle regulations are good for the environment and the economy—but people who don’t plan to buy new cars can also reduce their driving-related impact on the environment. Maintaining and driving a vehicle efficiently can make a big difference. Of course, the best way to reduce fuel consumption is to get out of your car. Walking, cycling, or using public transit mean fewer cars spewing emissions and less gridlock, which causes pollution as cars waste fuel while idling.
Getting out of the car isn’t always possible, though, especially in rural areas not served by public transit, where travel distances and weather often make walking and cycling impractical. Designing communities around people instead of cars by investing more in public transit and less on roads and freeways is important in the long term, but for now drivers can reduce their current gas consumption by as much as 20 per cent with a few ecodriving tips—something the David Suzuki Foundation’s Quebec office learned with its Drive Smart or Roulez Mieux campaign.
As with the new government fuel standards, adopting better driving habits demonstrates that doing what’s right for the environment also makes good economic sense. Beyond saving money on gas, drivers can reduce wear on their cars, saving on maintenance and car-replacement costs.
One of the first things you can do is make your transportation more efficient through planning. Instead of making separate trips to get to work and the store, combine the journeys. Joining a car pool is also a great idea.
Keeping your vehicle properly maintained, with regular tune-ups, including air filter and oil changes, and tires in good shape and properly inflated will allow you to go further on less gas.
Driving habits also help. Avoiding rush hour and driving defensively can help ensure that the fuel you burn will get you to your destination more quickly and efficiently. Shutting off the engine if your car is stopped for more than a minute makes sense too. Slowing down also helps. Going over the speed limit won’t get you to your destination much faster, but it will burn more fuel.
Other good habits include keeping your trunk clean—as less weight requires less fuel to transport—and using the car’s accessories sparingly.
It’s up to all of us to do what we can to reduce the emissions that contribute to climate change. That’s especially true because governments are often slow to act and don’t always go far enough. Sometimes they need a bit of a push, from individuals, communities, businesses, or even other levels of government. For example, the U.S. emissions standards were developed in response to tough standards enacted by the state of California and adopted by other states. (In Canada, Quebec was the first province to implement tougher fuel standards.)
As fossil fuels become scarce, and as our knowledge of the impacts of pollution and global warming increases, the benefits of doing all we can to use less gas just keep adding up. For the new fuel standards, savings at the gas pump will even offset the higher costs of the new fuel-efficient vehicles. The new standards will also lead to more jobs, as new technologies are developed.
We have a long way to go in resolving the issues around our love affair with the car and environmental destruction, but at least we’re getting started.
Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.
What's worse for the environment, 100,000 clean burning cars or 1,000 soot blowing diesel buses? Work it out, SVP; the diesel buses emit twice the GHG emissions of the cars and an infinite amount of arsenic, lead ”¦ mercury that cars don’t. Let's do something for the environment and our health; let's get people off diesel buses and into hybrid and electric cars!
Because $600 of the $900 single fare transit cost is picked up by taxpayers, for instance, we’ll be lower taxes, too, if more people drive! TransLink: B-Line me, I mean supersize me!
>> diesel bus is on the road 20 times longer than the average driver's 45 minute commute
In order for that to happen, the bus would have to be driving 20 times slower. If the car is doing an average of 40 km/h then the you're suggesting buses averages 2 km/h. I know it can seem like a long time on the bus, but I think you need to check your logic.
Or are you suggesting that because a bus drives all day it should be compared to a single car trip? Talk about apples to oranges. The bus delivered hundreds of people to their destinations, the car probably delivered 1 or 2.
The rest of your figures are just as suspect. How much would taxes go up in order to build the roads to support 100000 cars instead of 1000 buses? California is broke for a reason. Also, how much GHGs are emitted manufacturing 100000 cars instead of 1000 buses?
I think you'd be better off arguing for upgraded diesel fuel, or electric buses, instead of doing away with public transit.
Can you or TransLink do the calculation to show that diesel buses pollute less than if we had single occupancy vehicles instead of diesel buses? Can you calculate the toxic emissions from the 99 B-Lines for me and show me that they are less polluting than cars? The earth is not flat but people like you with limited understanding ridiculed people like me hundreds of years ago. Let's calculate the difference in CO2 emissions between cars and diesel buses:
Approximately one-thousand diesel buses move 100,000 riders daily (200,000 boardings per day in the Lower Mainland, see TransLink web-site). Let x = the CO2 emitted per hour for the car. Then, the CO2 emitted for the diesel bus per hour is at least 10x. The average driver commutes 45 km daily (from the CBC, "Who Killed the Electric Car") for a duration of approximately one hour. The diesel bus, in contrast, operates many nearly empty hours and "Not in Service" hours along with a few hours of overcrowding for a duration of at least 18 hours daily.
For the miserable ride on the 1,000 diesel buses each day, the emissions are as follows:
(1,000)(10x)(18) = 180,000x
For the comfortable trip in the 100,000 cars each day, the emissions are as follows:
(100,000)(x)(1) = 100,000x
In other words, the B-Lines have almost doubled CO2 emissions in Vancouver so that UBC can sell luxury condos rather than build residences on campus for students and to make TransLink tons of money after the B-Line diesel bus is paid off after one or two years. Don't forget, cars also don't emit toxic levels of lung damaging emissions like the B-Lines, either. Simple, eh?
May I see your calcs? Call TransLink and ask TransLink to help with the figures; you’ll be waiting a long, long time. TransLink won’t reply because it can’t show that diesel buses pollute less than cars.
You wrote:
Approximately one-thousand diesel buses move 100,000 riders daily (200,000 boardings per day in the Lower Mainland
How did you get to 100k riders from 200k boardings? If it really is 200k riders then your GHG figures for buses just got cut in half, which would beat the cars.
You wrote:
For the miserable ride on the 1,000 diesel buses each day, the emissions are as follows:
(1,000)(10x)(18) = 180,000x
I suppose 18 hours is 6am to midnight. Are there really 1000 diesel buses on the road between say 11pm and midnight? There's a total of 200 routes in Metro Van. Subtract all the electric trolleys and I think you'd get about 200 diesel buses tops on the road.at that hour. That just reduced your GHG calcs by 2000x. That's the sort of stuff that makes your whole argument suspect.
On the other hand, if we could magically replace 1000 buses with 100000 cars we'd have insta-gridlock.
Don't get me wrong...I'm not for sooty diesel. I'd rather Translink stop subsidizing the money-losing buses in the burbs and expand the money-making trolley infrastructure in the densely populated areas. Clean air is great, but we can't get their with SOVs.
2 boardings = 1 person, right? If you take transit, you generally make a return trip, so the 200,000 boardings actually mean 100,000 transit users.
Only about 12% of the population in the Lower Mainland takes transit (220,000 transit users for all modes, SeaBus, SkyTrain, HandyDart, trolley buses and diesel buses). The ~ 1,000 diesel buses account for ~ 100,000 transit users.
Many buses like the B-Line operate 22 hours each day, on average 18 hours is representative and even conservative.
There are 188 trolley buses in Vancouver, most of the trolley bus routes use diesel buses 85% to 100% of the time, anyhow, with the exception of some downtown Vancouver trolley bus routes.
There are 884 convention diesel buses and 136 articulated diesel buses or ~ 1000 diesel buses in the Lower Mainland, refer to this link,
http://www.translink.ca/en/Plans-and-Projects/Fleet-Expansion-and-Replac...
When TransLink went on strike in 2002, we didn't have instant gridlock and the air quality in Point Grey along the B-Line route where I live was never better.
Clean air is great and we can get there if we don't use diesel buses and switch to cars because cars don't concentrate emissions on a few roads like soot blowing diesel buses. Cars also go through AirCare but diesel buses don’t because they can’t pass.
I think that we generally agree that diesel buses are bad but you need to do some research and base your arguments on facts rather than on conjecture.
Call Metro-Vancouver for air quality data on bus routes. The worst air quality and noise pollution occur on diesel bus routes, so how does transit improve air quality and our health?
David Suzuki, any thoughts?
Now there's an improvement well worth the cost.
seth
It is relevant to the topic and the nuclear solution to energy/climate issues is an indisputable fact. Sadly there are those who will not see!!!
seth
Some very convincing facts in the comments here suggest that the environmental benefits of diesel bus transit are myths when you crunch the numbers. Of course, if TransLink or you could crunch through the numbers to show, otherwise, I would expect to see a response. Since you aren't presenting any proof or response and are only voting against comments which dispute your opinion, it tends to suggest that you really don't know what you are taking about here.
one B Line bus=75 cars
Last time I looked the buses were packed during the peak hours in Vancouver and in the other cities in the region.
On the other hand:
one expensive rail project=$2.4 billion
carries less than 6500 people per peak hour
most passengers delivered to the train stations by bus.
Number of vehicles on the road during the same peak hour
550,000
Now where would you place limited public resources?
just how much does it cost the taxpayer to get auto manufacturers to take some responsibility for their designs?
little or no public tax dollars are required to make car makers clean up their mess.
Most of the buses are taken off the road during the non-peak hours, one need only go by any of the bus garages and see this, so the argument that buses run empty most of the day is just plain hogwash and those who disagree need to see an optometrist.
On nuclear power:
Read comment on nuclear power and limited uranium supplies elsewhere on GS blog and tell me that nuclear power is the future...more money down the drain and massive consumer rate increases will occur.
170 million tonnes of uranium needed annually for current nuclear power needs and only 90 million tonnes of uranium produced annually to service that need. Gee, what does this tell you? The stockpiles of the 1970's are quickly depleting.
Takes more than 10 years to get a uranium mine into production. China expects to have 160 nuclear power reactors running by 2030. Most of these plants will be large generating facilities and will require lots of uranium from an already scarce supply. China is not alone in setting significant nuclear energy goals for its future...but it has no choice except to continue to burn dirty coal.
What will this do to the cost of that supply? We had oil up to $150/barrel where will uranium's price go to? Time to bring out the LED flashlights folks if the nuke boosters get their way.
Nuclear power will be more detrimental to economic growth in other sectors of the economy than triple digit oil prices. And shhhhh...don't mention the fact that there still are no safe ways to deal with radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. The saying, see no evil...is dead on.
"Clean" coal is not proven, is only experimental at this time and the Canadian gov't financed experimental project is laughable at best. It resembles a back yard still. Transporting carbon gases in a pipeline is fine but who is willing to pay for it? So far no buyers! Oil companies expect this gas for free so are public subsidies far off?
I agree with Suzuki, zero emission targets need to be set but this should not mean nuclear until some bright soul can come up with another way to produce power without uranium or another substance that takes tens of thousands of years to become safe.
When it comes to diesel buses, if you remember the Mean Value Theorem in calculus, you can appreciate that you have to integrate the emissions from the diesel buses to compare them to the emissions from cars. Maybe some buses are only used for peak service but on average most of the 1,000 diesel buses operate 18 hours or somewhere near that duration when you average in the few buses which operate 22 hours each day for night service and the few buses which operate about 8 hours each day for peak service.
The duration and frequency that the diesel buses operate is important to calculate the emissions from the diesel buses. If you want to see empty diesel buses during peak hours between 6 am to 10 am, stand at the corner of Blanca and W10th Avenue in the morning where you'll see bus after bus of empty (NOT IN SERVICE, or showing CHECK, whatever that means) articulated diesel buses returning to Commercial Drive from UBC. Integrate the emissions from diesel buses getting 3 mpg and compare these emissions to 100,000 cars getting at least 30 mpg. Cars win hands down because when the driver isn’t in the car, the car is off.
I'm not perfect and am not always right but the environmental benefits of diesel buses are a lie when you consider their toxic emissions, which exceed WHO standards, and GHG emissions. Still no comment TransLink et al? I'm not the least bit surprised!
Despite all the hype from TransLink about removing cars from the roads with its B-Line service, TransLink has actually just made it easy for students to live in Burnaby and take the B-Line. Moreover, the B-Line has taken students off non-polluting trolley buses to put them on polluting diesel buses.
Without, the B-Line service, it is much more plausible that transit demand would drop without much of an increase in vehicle traffic as students would be taking the trolley buses and living nearer to UBC instead of buying a BMW. The B-Line service has actually increased transit costs, transit noise, traffic congestion and air pollution, therefore, without removing many cars from the roads!