Don’t miss all the latest banter between me and and BikeLoud PDX board member and retired bike shop owner, Eva Frazier.
Here are just some of the tangents we rolled down…
- Hating on planes and “freeways in the sky”… and are trains even eco-friendly?
- My trip to California and cul-de-sac life laments (and I’m leaving again on Tuesday for another family visit to Hungary).
- PBOT’s hardening plan for paint-and-plastic bike lanes.
- Recap of the 2nd Annual Bike Happy Hour Show & Shine
- Eva recaps the Future Sandy bike ride along, “the perfect hypotenuse of the triangle of Portland.”
- My big personal and professional news about my exciting new job.
- That weird and wonky fake PBOT sign on NE 7th.
- The 82nd Avenue project and sharing the lane with buses.
- How all our (we, the community’s!) work on candidates has made transportation a big campaign issue.
- BikePortland should bring back weekly political cartoons. (Here are the old ones)
- Why I left Twitter/X and moved to Threads.
- Eva’s affinity for western wear and riding in a cowboy hat.
- The problem with salty chips and our favorite bike-camping snacks.
- and more!!
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for reading.
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OMG, trains don’t burn coal anymore and haven’t for decades and decades. We’re not living in the 1800s. They do burn fossil fuels, but in the form of diesel, just like trucks. Some trains are converting to electric, but most are diesel, and the only few trains that still burn coal are those little tourist trains that are just there to show how “old-timey” trains work.
All the points are valid, flying is better than taking a train for long cross-country trips, but the idea that trains still burn coal…is very not true.
yeah that didn’t seem right. Thanks for clarifying Loki. I’ll share a correction comment in the next episode.
Almost all the olde timey steam engines have been converted to oil. They still make big clouds of polluting smoke, though.
Firing a train with coal requires a huge amount of unpleasant, dangerous physical labor.
As for the question of trains vs. planes, here is a reference:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/04/climate/trains-planes-carbon-footprint-pollution.html
I disagree with the article’s methodology — I think the differential between emissions of a single passenger choosing to take a train is probably marginally better than flying, but given that the airline will probably fill the empty seat anyway, it may be pretty close to zero.
The article’s numbers become very important if you’re comparing things at the system level; airplanes are (apparently) much more efficient than trains for covering the long distances we have in the US.
There’s also questions about what the correct quantity to calculate is. The GHG emissions per passenger mile under the status quo is an obvious and attractive statistic, but it might not be the best one to inform transportation system planning. For one thing, trains seem way easier to electrify, so building train infrastructure that can be electrified in the future might be better than building tons of new airplanes and airports for them to use, even if the planes can break even on emission right now. Biofuels (or some other sustainably produced high energy density fuel) could change things. Further, as the nytimes piece points out, the emissions differential depends a lot on average trip length, which could change if people take fewer long trips.
We don’t need to build tons more new airports; we have most of what we need to satisfy today’s travel demand. I wouldn’t expect that to grow significantly in the future (at least not beyond the rate of population increase).
Trains are — theoretically — easier to electrify, except that we’re not doing it, and there is no real prospect of doing it outside of the massive investments in new high speed rail corridors. New batteries could shift that calculus somewhat.
On the other hand, people are testing electric short-haul flights (the most polluting ones) now, and it is absolutely possible to generate aviation fuel from non-fossil sources that are carbon-neutral. It’s just a matter of cost.
Would it cost more to build a new electric rail line from, say, Chicago to Portland, or to subsidize higher cost fuel for airplanes flying that route? If running a train takes more energy overall, it may also be more energy efficient to stick with planes, and that’s before you even consider the energy required to build a new high speed rail line. (And how would you convince people to change from hours-long flights to days long train trips?)
Electrification of rail is a long, long ways off, if it ever happens. We can generate carbon-neutral aviation fuel today (and perhaps we are — I don’t actually know what’s going on in that space).
Here’s an interesting link. I don’t know this source, but I’ve heard about this several times, so I know it’s legit.
https://patentyogi.com/aircraft/us-navy-plans-produce-jet-fuel-seawater-board-aircraft-carriers