Environmental impact of transportation including infrastructure

[Glen]

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/4/2/024008/erl9_2_024008.html

Discussion of the environmental performance of transit modes often focuses on the ranking of vehicles assuming average occupancy. This approach does not acknowledge that there are many conditions under which modes can perform equally. For example, an SUV (which is one of the worst energy performers) with 2 passengers (giving 3.5 MJ/PKT) is equivalent to a bus with 8 passengers. Similarly, CA HRT with 120 passengers (27% occupancy giving 1.8 MJ/PKT) is equivalent to a midsize aircraft with 105 passengers (75% occupancy). Similarly, commuter rail (with one of the highest average per-PKT NOX emission rates) at 34% occupancy (147 passengers) is equivalent to a bus with 13 passengers or a sedan with one passenger. Focusing on occupancy improvements does not acknowledge the sensitivity of performance to technological changes. For example, holding occupancy at the average, electric rail modes would have to decrease SO2 per-PKT emissions between 24 and 85% to compete with onroad modes, an effort that would have to focus on electricity fuel inputs and scrubbers at power plants.

 

[TOinTO]

Indeed. When you get your electricity from coal plants, even electric trains can be blamed for a lot of SO2 and Nitrogen Oxides. With this analysis, electric cars will look worse than gasoline burning

The conclusion is pretty sensible,

Through the use of life-cycle environmental assessments, energy and emission reduction decision-making can benefit from the identified interdependencies among processes, services, and products. The use of comprehensive strategies that acknowledge these connections are likely to have a greater impact than strategies that target individual components.

Look at the big picture. Don't ignore your crappy old power plants when you're looking to get pollution reduction through rapid transit.

Unfortunately, you can expect the likes of Neil Reynolds to cite this as proof that that subways pollute more than cars.

 

[Whoaccio]

It wouldn't surprise me if certain exceptionally low ridership subway routes did pollute more than car, from a life cycle point of view. Tunnel boring has got to be one of the more energy intensive activities out there, if only a few people end up riding the finished system it could conceivably end up with a higher life cycle energy cost per passenger km traveled than expanding a well used highway. That would be an extreme example, though.

 

[kettal]

With this analysis, electric cars will look worse than gasoline burning

Even then, you'll find huge discrepancy between rush hour commuting, and driving on a freeway with no traffic.

 

[Glen]

Even then, you'll find huge discrepancy between rush hour commuting, and driving on a freeway with no traffic.

Electric cars are not as penalized by city driving.

 

[Hipster Duck]

As someone who’s studied LCA/LCIA, I can say that the field of Industrial Ecology and Life Cycle analysis is still an emerging one – sort of like statistics in the 1890s when George Bernard Shaw made his famous quote about lies, damn lies and statistics. There’s still a lot of uncertainty and very few tools for complete accountability, so researchers and their methodology can skew the results in any way they want. I hope that over the next few decades, LCA/LCIA becomes a much more robust tool and doesn’t – in the words of a professor of mine who specializes in hybrid LCA – introduce uncertainties that are too statistically significant to say anything meaningful.

The first thing I look for in an LCA is geographic context. If they don’t explicitly mention the regional scope, the report is not worth the paper it’s printed on. Of course, running an electric streetcar or trolleybus in nuclear Ontario or hydropowered British Columbia has a very different emissions profile from California where this LCA (actually, I’m not exactly sure because they mix Boston and SF interchangeably and don’t mention where the cars are supposed to be from) hails from, with its high proportion of fossil-fuel-generated electricity and low sulphur (by mandate) gasoline.

Secondly, the social ramifications of transit use are completely ignored, so what is the purpose of doing an LCIA? The whole point of impact analyses are to study their effects on our socio-economic system – an attempt to integrate and quantify externalities that aren’t accounted for through costing. If it doesn’t do that, why bother? Where is the discussion on how lifestyle changes when riders shift from being primarily car drivers to primarily transit users, and its effect on overall emissions? What about the environmental impact that would result from building the necessary infrastructure to support a society where everyone drove and nobody took alternative modes of transport? What about the environmental impact of a radically different built form that cities with high transit ridership can support compared to auto-centric cities? What about unforseen (and frankly intangible) social effects that could alter the emissions profile in unimaginable ways? This introduces enough uncertainty in the analysis to completely undermine the report.

Finally, the variables studied are selective. If you’re doing an analysis of air pollution, why not use EPA criteria? Where’s PM10? Where’s PM2.5? Where’s ozone?

Sorry, Glen, this report doesn’t really prove anything.

 

[Glen]

Sorry, Glen, this report doesn’t really prove anything.

Hell, I can say the same about any study. While I never purported this to be definitive in any way, it does offer some typically overlooked information. More information is never bad.

 

[Hipster Duck]

Yeah, but false, misleading information is just noise.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

For the accounting of automobile (and buses) roadway construction costs - what of the issue of "sizing" the infrastructure with regards to cost, and how it varies if you look at a system that can handle a theoretical peak load of car usage?

AoD

 

[Glen]

Yeah, but false, misleading information is just noise.

So what it does not study the impact on our socio-economic system. I am sorry but most research is not all encompassing.

The first thing I look for in an LCA is geographic context. If they don’t explicitly mention the regional scope, the report is not worth the paper it’s printed on. Of course, running an electric streetcar or trolleybus in nuclear Ontario or hydropowered British Columbia has a very different emissions profile from California where this LCA (actually, I’m not exactly sure because they mix Boston and SF interchangeably and don’t mention where the cars are supposed to be from) hails from, with its high proportion of fossil-fuel-generated electricity and low sulphur (by mandate) gasoline.

From the paper.....

While the energy input to GHG emissions correlation holds for almost all modes, there is a more pronounced effect between the California (CA) and Massachusetts (MA) LRT systems. The San Francisco Bay Area's electricity is 49% fossil fuel-based and Massachusetts's is 82% [26, 27]. The result is that the Massachusetts LRT, which is the lowest operational energy user and roughly equivalent in life-cycle energy use to the other rail modes, is the largest GHG emitter.

 

[Hipster Duck]

So what it does not study the impact on our socio-economic system. I am sorry but most research is not all encompassing.

No, what I meant is that an LCA/LCIA that uses selective data (like only a handful of the standard air pollution indicators), doesn't cite geographic context and can't tell me anything about the greater ramifications of pollution on society is a meaningless report. It doesn't have to be all-encompassing but it has to encompass something.

While the energy input to GHG emissions correlation holds for almost all modes, there is a more pronounced effect between the California (CA) and Massachusetts (MA) LRT systems. The San Francisco Bay Area's electricity is 49% fossil fuel-based and Massachusetts's is 82% [26, 27]. The result is that the Massachusetts LRT, which is the lowest operational energy user and roughly equivalent in life-cycle energy use to the other rail modes, is the largest GHG emitter.

Where were the automobiles used in the study manufactured? What transportation mode was employed in their shipment? Did they track the supply chain of the automobile manufacturing process? What are the pollution profiles of the manufacturers on the supply chain? How much pollution was emitted by paving X kms of roads to support total car use in Boston and San Francisco? Repeat this for transit vehicle manufacturing and operation and you might just scratch the surface of something that might have some factual basis for comparison.

 

[Glen]

Hipster, IMO you ask for the impossible. Would you care to offer a link to a paper (any subject) that meets your threshold of completeness?

 

[Hipster Duck]

Glen,

The Dutch pioneered a method called "Eco-indicator 99" a few years ago that is very thorough in analyzing the extraction, transport, manufacture, use and disposal characteristics of a product. Since so much of the energy and pollution involved in a product's life cycle comes from its manufacture and the extraction of raw materials, you can't really perform an adequate life cycle analysis if you don't take these into account and, very importantly, define the process by which something was produced. For example, what sort of industrial process was involved in steel manufacturing for a car? it can vary significantly from electric arc furnaces recycling scrap steel to a coke-fueled oven in China.

The whole discipline is still very new and working out a lot of kinks. LCAs are pretty revealing, but not enough to inform policy in my opinion - at least not at this time. Somewhat ironically, progress in this field has kind of slowed down rather than sped up in recent years - which is stupid, because this could finally give our manufacturing an edge over low-wage outsourcing countries, especially with a shift to environmentally conscious consuming. Oh well.

I'd like to see a definitive transportation-related life cycle analysis, but there's too much variance in the use of both private and public transit vehicles to draw any conclusions. Right now, the case studies I've looked at were mostly things like coffee cups (this is fairly straightforward because very few materials are involved in its manufacture and most disposable cups are only used in one way - use and dispose) - which has some surprising results!

 

[Glen]

Glen,

The Dutch pioneered a method called "Eco-indicator 99" a few years ago that is very thorough in analyzing the extraction, transport, manufacture, use and disposal characteristics of a product. Since so much of the energy and pollution involved in a product's life cycle comes from its manufacture and the extraction of raw materials, you can't really perform an adequate life cycle analysis if you don't take these into account and, very importantly, define the process by which something was produced. For example, what sort of industrial process was involved in steel manufacturing for a car? it can vary significantly from electric arc furnaces recycling scrap steel to a coke-fueled oven in China.

The whole discipline is still very new and working out a lot of kinks. LCAs are pretty revealing, but not enough to inform policy in my opinion - at least not at this time. Somewhat ironically, progress in this field has kind of slowed down rather than sped up in recent years - which is stupid, because this could finally give our manufacturing an edge over low-wage outsourcing countries, especially with a shift to environmentally conscious consuming. Oh well.

I'd like to see a definitive transportation-related life cycle analysis, but there's too much variance in the use of both private and public transit vehicles to draw any conclusions. Right now, the case studies I've looked at were mostly things like coffee cups (this is fairly straightforward because very few materials are involved in its manufacture and most disposable cups are only used in one way - use and dispose) - which has some surprising results!

I hope you don't misunderstand me. I agree with what you are saying. What I disagree with is that, despite ambiguous or even incomplete data, is that it is worthless. I could point you towards thousands of papers on GABA in pub med and they would all fail the same litmus test.