Transportation:Is energy a personal issue or a public issue?

According J.D. Chapman of Geography and Energy Longman Scientific & Technical, transporters need to seek "a compromise between spped and energy(costs)"[1]. The lowest energy consumption are associated with bulk freight at low speed; whereas, high energy consumption is related to passengers traveling at a high speed, as seen by figure 1.

 [1]

Figure 1: Energy costs v. Speed in Transportation

Referring to the figure above, cars fall into the worst performance vehicles category, which is one of the top means of transportation for the general public. Even buses, trains, and helicopters consume a lot of energy. It is highly impractical to use bicycles or planes to get to work, thus cars buses and trains are the best option to travel but this means higher energy consumption. Based on this diagram, there is no good performance vehicle for passenger transportation.

On the other hand, freight transportation has a lower energy cost compared to passenger transportation with a tanker being the best means of transportation.  However, "most people travel with their own cars in the United States[2]." a tanker is not suitable for people, so what is the best method for traveling?  There is not really a good answer because all passenger vehicles appear to have a high energy cost.

The better question is whether the passenger transportation is a public issue or a personal issue. Is there a lack of public transportation such as buses, trains, subways, taxis, etc.? In some cities there is limited public transporation, but overall in the United States there is a sufficient amount of public transit availble. However, "most people travel with their own cars in the United States [2]." This can be seen in table 1 below.

Table 1: Passenger vehicles

[3]



The use of cars is probably because a lot of people do not want to pay money on a day to basis to ride the subway or take a taxi/bus. Some people claim, public transportation is gross or full of germs and they would only resort to taking public transportation if they had no other way to travel. Passenger planes are used if there is a need to travel long distances.

It is important to note that most of the general public is lazy, so walking or riding a bicycle would be nearly impossible to make a rule.

To summarize, if you view transportation in terms of passenger vehicles than the cost of energy consumption would be very high for both personal users and the general public. Because both are high, there would not a significant decrease in energy consumption if everyone started using public tranportation, such as buses. We should focus our efforts into creating "greener vehicles" to diminish the cost of energy instead of debating if energy is a personal or public issue.





[1]http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/energymode.html
[2]http://www.immihelp.com/newcomer/publictransport.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_in_the_United_States