Is a Plane More Fuel Efficient Than a Prius?

Question: Has this been normalized to different types of fuels?  Jet fuel, for instance, is much more processed than regular gasoline, and probably takes more gallons of crude oil to produce.

motor coach is incorrect, at 5 miles per gallon, you get .2 gallon per mile, not .02

the “calorific conversion” of bicycle/walking is quite misleading.  ok, they take
energy, but they don’t use gas/fossil fuels in an equivalent or
comparable way to other modes of transport!

Ben: Here’s your decision path – want to get get 3000 miles in 6 hours, don’t take the boat. Want travel from Boston to Chicago, don’t take the boat. Want to spend 10 days in the sun with stops at ports along the way, don’t walk…Interesting, no doubt, useful to decision making – only if time is no object and cost variations (it’s much cheaper to drive from Boston to New York than take the train) are irrelevant.

Interesting, but quite misleading.  For starters, we’re talking about averages for most things, yet assume that all vehicles are operating at capacity – obviously motorcycles, bicycles and people do, but the other methods average many fewer occupants.Secondly, it assumes that each of these are only valued for their ability to transport passengers from point A to point B.  I don’t think anyone considers any type of sea travel as a true mode of transportation for passengers – it’s designed for moving freight.

So if i understand this chart correctly, the gas cans are suppose to represent the emitted green house gases. However, walking has more gas cans then taking the bus. Does this mean that if we were to never walk anywhere and just take the bus we would be helping the more then by having no cars at all? Now maybe Im making a drastic point, but this seems like more bull science wrapped up nice and pretty. This should be patronizing. The information has been dumbed down to the level of a child, but its very pleasing to the eye. All I really wanna make clear is that global warming is still a theory and not the strongest at that. Yet so many Americans think its solid fact and haven never even heard an argument against it. I suggest you take a look at the Ipcc’s 4th report, read the facts and make your own decision. You may wanna look into why the ipcc was created. And if you dont know who the IPCC is well then you have no business commenting on the issue until you get informed.

Umm, I don’t know what kind of vehicles you drive, but my SUV holds 25 gallons and my car holds 12. Where on earth did you come up with 5 and 4? That makes no sense.

To Anonymous who wrote on February 10th at 10:23 pm:According to the IPCC document that you cited, global warming is man-made.I have taken a look at the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report, found at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf, and it stated quite otherwise from what you were at least hinting at. It IPCC’s report stated that global warming is caused by:1) Emissions of GHGs (greenhouse gases), in order of amount:   a. CO2 from fossil fuel use   b. CO2 from deforestation, decay, and biomass (Granted the second two are natural, but are being sped up by human activity.)   c. Methane from agriculture wastes and energy.   d.N2O from agriculture   e. Various other sources of CO2 and Fluorinated gases, which, according to EurActiv.com, are mainly used in refrigeration and air conditioning.2) A combonation of GHGs, aerosols, land cover, and solar radiation.   a. GHGs raise temps   b. aerosols lower them, but do much more harm than good by influencing precipitation   c.the sun’s radiation, though GHGs have had more than 19x the effect since 1750 (around the time of the agricultural rev in UK, a bit before the industrial rev.)3) climate sensitivity and feedback (how the environment reacts)  a. water vapor: as GHGs lift temps, more water evaporates, raising temps  b. uptake reduction: warming makes ecosystem more unwilling to store/transform GHGsAlso, graphs in the same document show that tempurature models that disclude human causes are far less accurate as those that do: those that include human causes contain the line showing true temperature averages, while those that disclude human causes are far off.

If your going to do something like this and say gallons per person per mile, why deviate from it. That or someone is very bad at math.SUV 3.36Car 3.2Hybrid 1.9Motorcycle 5.95

Half the numbers are wrong. This is a poor graphical representation

@:Anonymous on February 10, 2009 at 10:24 pm Yeah, that 4 and 5 you see? Well, that’s people. 4 people. 5 people. Not gallons.

Cruise ships incinerate their garbage to power generators, which powers the engines. They don’t use fuel.

A number of folks who commented don’t seem to have noticed the dotted lines indicating different efficiencies based on the number of people in your car/SUV/hybrid.  On that note, my motorcycle fits two quite comfortably, and in India, I’ve seen a family of five riding one.  So, you know….

The chart is awesome. This is best case scenario travel using averages, per mile.  The criticisms here are nitpicking. 

3 things illustrated are:1) It is better to travel by bus, train or even plane than it is drive, even in a hybridized car.2) Cruise ships use a lot of fuel.3) Nothing is as efficient as a bicycle.The caloric conversion for human powered transportation is skewed, however.  A whopper is 770 calories, but far, far more energy goes into making them that that: water pumping & fertilizer for crops, shipping, processing.Regardless, the bike still comes out way ahead.

Whatever the figures may be off, aside from bicycle and walking, it looks like this country could use more public transportation.

A cruise ship is equivalent to a city with public utilities,kitchens, laundries, entertainment, security, etc, etc. If you factor in the carbon foot print of the MacDonalds that fuels your cyclist, add in her 20 min shower on arrival, and the 4-5 KW of power consumed in the average US home -  we might all do better to take our bicycles on a long ocean voyage! (But ride our bicycles to work when we quit dreaming and have to pay the bills). The chart was a nice idea – why not republish with above comments factored in?

how is the graph done technically please?

the chart is way off. on the top it states that it is a chart for miles per gallon per passenger, yet none of them except the bicycle and walking and the motorcycle have that info. if you multiply the miles per gallon by the amount of passengers then you will have the actual miles per gallon per passenger figure as stated on top of the chart. so the ship gets 26.235 mpg per passengerthe train 108.9 the plane 73.5the bus 250the suv 105the sedan 108 the hybrid 186 and the motorcycle 56 or 112 with two peoplesee you have to figure that an suv will take you 21 miles on one gallon, but if there are 5 people in it it will take 5 people 21 miles on the same gallon so that means each person is getting 105 miles per gallon because they each are only using 1/5th of the gas required to run the suv. its just like the bus that only gets 5mpg but its good because if it has 50 people on it then the per passenger mpg is 250 because every one pays 1/50th of the gas required for the bus to go 5 miles per gallon.

also if you just use assume that the number given are actually the actual miles per gallon per passenger like it says on the top of the chart and note the amount of miles per gallon that the vessel achieves then it takes 121 gallons to take 1 passenger 1 mile, that means that for 350 miles you need 42350 gallons per passenger. 1 gallon of diesel costs 2 dollars so the cost per passenger would be 84700 dollars just for enough gas to go for 350 miles. so the problem is that the chart doesnt include mpg per passenger anywhere on the chart except the motorbike, the bike and walking

The last two comments are very stupid. Look at the chart properly first before to make critics…  it does NOT takes 121 gallons to take 1 passenger on 1 mile, the whole boat takes 121 gallons to take all (2915) the passengers. Look instead at the the number of gallons drawn next to the numbers. For the cruise ships, it’s 14 gallons per passenger to cover 350 miles. As for the mpg per passenger, I hope you still have enough brain to figure that out by yourself.

Some of the people commenting on this are impressively stupid. How can so many people fail so spectacularly at reading a graph

Any engineering student would fail for making a graph like this.  You cant say you are looking at miles per gallon per passenger and then give gallons per mile for the whole vehicle.

Actually, Anonymous below me, “any engineering student” could see that the figures to the left are merely contributing factors provided for the reader’s interest, and that the actually amount graphed is gallons per 350 mile trip per passenger, as explicitly asked in the subtitle.  I would certainly hope you’re not an engineering student if you can’t do a simple unit conversion.

Where is a Segway on the chart?