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> A plane despite transporting hundreds of passengers is less efficient than a fully occupied car. And according to these numbers, a plane is more efficient th
by mrpopo 7y ago
> A plane despite transporting hundreds of passengers is less efficient than a fully occupied car.
And according to these numbers, a plane is more efficient than a car with 2 occupants. Average vehicle occupancy varies around 1.5 people.
It doesn't make the plane a better way to travel, of course. It just shows that individual cars need to be proscribed just as much as airplanes.
- dan-robertson 7y agoComparing planes to cars is slightly silly. One cannot drive across the Atlantic and it’s quite possible to fly much farther in a year than drive. Flying e.g. 6k miles is reasonably easy to do in a year. I think it is easy to not think about the impact as it all happens in a few gos. Driving 6k miles takes a long time and would be felt more acutely. It is easier to switch to cleaner forms of energy for this travel and one may be more inclined to reduce this energy usage as it is also a huge time sink.
- michaelt 7y agoA round trip from New York to Paris is ~7300 miles. A commute of 40 miles per day is ~9600 miles per year. I'd wager there are more people who commute 30 minutes each way by car than there are who go on an annual holiday to Europe :) Of course, reducing either would be a good thing.
- magduf 7y ago>A commute of 40 miles per day is ~9600 miles per year. That's a somewhat short commute by modern American standards too. Honestly, we'd all be better off if we stopped driving to work and made our cities denser and used trains to get around, had more/better train service between nearby cities, and then took annual holidays in Europe on Airbus A380 aircraft that were configured with only economy seating (700+ passengers per plane).
- pessimizer 7y agoThe difference in difficulty of redesigning all cities, remaking public transportation, and locating all workers near their workplaces or figuring out a way they can telecommute, as opposed to skipping the annual holiday to Europe, is vast.
- magduf 7y agoWell it's never going to happen if you just throw up your hands and say "it's impossible". How about starting right now, by raising gas taxes and changing zoning regulations and encouraging denser development?
- pessimizer 7y agoNow imagine you go to 2-4 conferences a year, like the plurality of the respondents. In addition to your own 40 mile commute. If we're making great efforts to even slow down the acceleration of greenhouse gas emissions, I find it odd to come up with ways to rationalize emitting 2-3x the result of a very long commute. Especially when the endpoint is a programming/software conference.
- x3ro 7y agoThis does not factor in the fact that planes cover vastly more distance than cars though, right? People rarely drive 10000km to eg a conference or vacation.
- mrpopo 7y agoDoes it matter if people drive 10000km over a year for business meetings or if people go to a conference once a year by plane?
- sokoloff 7y agoHow common is it to trade those off against each other? "Oh, because I went to that conference, I'm cancelling all my driving meetings for the rest of the year." is a sentence that has probably never been uttered before I just did now.