Freakonomics Radio - 101. Mass Transit Hysteria

Episode Date: November 14, 2012

Adding more train and bus lines looks like an environmental slam dunk. Until you start to do the math.

From APM, American Public Media, and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace. Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Risdahl. Time now for a little bit of Freakonomics Radio, that moment in the broadcast every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. The hidden side of everything is what it's all about. Dubner, how are you, man? Doing well, Kai. Thanks. Here in New York, we are recovering still from Sandy. The transit system has mostly recovered. Our subways and buses getting back to moving about 7 million passengers a day,

if you can believe it. Which is, I mean, honestly, it's amazing. And the fact that they pumped out all that water is kind of crazy. It is. And, you know, we've been doing it for years and years. All that mass transit means that New Yorkers have one of the smallest per capita carbon footprints in the entire United States, because we all know that mass transit is very, very good for the environment, correct? We do know that. And the only thing we don't know is where you're going, Debra. That's the only thing I don't know. Let's start by, I'm going to introduce you to Eric Morris, who's a regular contributor to freeeconomics.com, and he's a professor of urban planning at Clemson University. All right, hit me.

Mass transit can be an incredible boon for the environment. It can also not help the environment or maybe even hurt the environment. Make up your mind, man. Come on. How's that for clarity? Okay. Let's say we're trying to figure out the energy efficiency of transporting one person, Kai Risdahl, let's say, in a car versus in a train or bus.

Okay. Here's Morris again. Obviously, the energy expenditure in moving around a transit vehicle per passenger mile depends on the number of passengers. Whether you have one passenger in a bus or 40 passengers in a bus, you're going to be expending almost the same amount of energy. So it all depends on the ridership and the occupancy that transit vehicles, and for that matter, autos carry. All right. So what do we know about occupancy and ridership? Eric Morris tells us the average American car carries 1.6 people, not many, of course, especially if you're thinking about comparing it to mass transit.

On the other hand, the average bus carries only 10 people and a bus burns an awful lot more fuel than a car, which led Morris to this rather surprising conclusion. Typically, moving a passenger a mile by bus requires roughly 20 percent more energy than moving a passenger around by car. So just in terms of energy expenditure, bus actually fares worse than car. That is crazy, man. And also, this is the point in the broadcast where we're going to start getting a lot of nasty letters because people are going to go, wait, how can that be? I don't understand. Don't worry. We're going to tick off other people in a moment, so don't worry about that. Let me do say this, though.

Trains are actually, on average, better than cars, more energy efficient per passenger, although that number is warped a little bit by one subway system, the New York City subway, which is just a monster of size and efficiency. So let me just recap here, right, because this is a little twisted. If I take the bus in an average American city, I'm hurting the environment more than if I just drive myself to work, right? And the trains are better than that, but not by a whole lot. Well, look, honestly, it's not so simple. It's very hard to come up with an answer to that specific question because of the trade-offs here. There's time trade-offs. You got to think about

land use for parking, traffic fatalities that come with car travel that don't come with train travel. But Eric Morris's point is this. If you're thinking about carbon footprints for moving people around, we've all caught a bit of what you might call mass transit hysteria. We think that it's the solution, but it's not necessarily. It'll work great in a place like New York, but in other areas, you know, we've picked a lot of the low hanging fruit. You try to put a new train system in a smaller city where York, but in other areas, you know, we've picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit. You try to put a new train system in a smaller city where people don't have access to it, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Memphis, and those places, those train systems actually do worse than cars in terms of energy efficiency. Here's Eric Morris one more time. In general, pumping up ridership by

constructing new transit systems or adding new transit service has to be looked at very skeptically. On the other hand, if we can persuade more people to leave cars and move on to the existing transit service that we already have, that's a complete win for the environment. Persuading people to leave their cars, though, that's kind of interesting. Yeah, it's like the Onion once put it, 98% of U.S. commuters favor public transportation for others. That's right. But I mean, if but if you're this Clemson guy, Morris, how do you convince people to leave their cars? Well, look, if if you're a liberal and you hate the idea that we are sort of discouraging certain kinds of mass transit, here's an idea that you can hate if you're a conservative. OK, you get people to leave their cars by raising tolls on roads and taxes on gas and parking to incentivize more people to ride the transit systems that we've already spent billions on and are underused. Hey, before we go, let me ask you. So did you what did you take a cab today? Ride the train down to the studios? What?

None of the above. I'm in my office across the street from my apartment, so I hooked it. Nice. Nobody else's carbon was killed in the making of this episode from my end, right? Stephen Dunder, freeeconomics.com is the website. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. Okay, Kai, thank you. Coming up on the next Freakonomics Radio, what do management consultants actually do? So, Levitt, between college and graduate school, you worked as a consultant. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

I did. I worked for a little company called Corporate Decisions, Inc. That sounds so made up. Corporate Decisions, Inc. So you got a job, and what kind of consulting were you doing? What kind of firms were you going into? Mostly on pharmaceuticals while I was there. And how much did you know about pharmaceuticals generally before you got there?

I knew that you could buy aspirin at the grocery store. On the next episode of Freakonomics Radio, I consult, therefore, I am. If you want to see more of what we do, come visit us at Freakonomics.com. Thank you.