New Study Confirms That Trains Are Green, But It’s More Fun to Say it Says Something Else

Environmentalists, rail advocates, and people who know what they’re talking about are fond of arguing that rail is a more ecologically sustainable mode of transportation than driving a car or flying in an airplane. You can make this point quickly by comparing the emissions per passenger miles traveled. But, as trainophobes like to say, things don’t look as good if you take a wider view that includes the ecological impact of construction. But then I shoot back that if you take a truly comprehensive view consider land-use impacts, then rail looks unbeatable. At any rate, there’s an article in The New Scientist which takes a study that uses the arbitrary makes-trains-look-bad intermediate standard and offers up the headline “Train can be worse for climate than plane”.

The fact of the matter, however, as Ryan Avent helpfully explains is that the study merely confirms what we already know—trains are ecologically sound. The examples of scenarios in which trains can be worse for climate are absurd. The best they can come up with is that “Life-cycle energy use for light rail in San Francisco is a tad higher than that for a large airplane, and life-cycle emissions for light rail in Boston is a tad higher than that for large and medium sized airplanes.” Needless to say, though, you can’t get around Boston in a medium-sized airplane. A trip on Boston’s Green Line uses less energy that would doing the trip in a car. You could, of course, take a trip from Boston to New York in a medium sized airplane. But it would be more energy efficient to do it in a train.