Ever wondered just how much carbon you're saving by carpooling? Or if train travel is really that efficient compared to air? Well wonder no more, as the good folks over at Low Impact Living have written a detailed breakdown of an ingenius little Web site called Trip Footprint.
With this little tool you can calculate the carbon cost of long distance travel comparing trains, cars, hybrid cars, and planes (to various airports.) You can even adjust the calculation by how many people are traveling in your party.
This is a pretty neat toy, though I do have some problems with their calculations. Without looking directly at the site's math, it seems that (for rail travel) they aren't prorating correctly. It looks like a simple factor of multiplying a base carbon rate by the number of travelers and this neglects the weight of the train itself, which is constant no matter how many passengers are on board. Further, even if your traveling party is five - the highest number you can select on the site - the amount of carbon used in train travel will depend on how many other people are on the train (which is probably more than five). Air travel on this calculator seems to have the same pitfall.
In all, this is a neat idea that might give a visual representation of the efficiency of various modes of travel... or it might mean absolutely nothing.
Hey Eric. Thanks for the mention. I'm one of the developers of Trip Footprint. Transparency's really important to us, so we list our sources under every set of trip footprint data.
ReplyDeleteMost of our figures are based on the Union of Concerned Scientists' "Getting There Greener" report, online at http://www.ucsusa.org/gettingtheregreener ; read the report's appendices for more information on their methodology and assumptions around rail. Hope this helps.
-- Anirvan from Trip Footprint