Four/The Ideology of "The Open Road"

I'm going off the rails on this crazy train.
- Ozzy Osbourne


As the 2008 campaigns for a Democratic presidential candidate moved into Pennsylvania, Jon Stewart and his Daily Show video archivists showed a clip of Barack Obama waving to a crowd from the back of a train car on April 21. "Obama all-aboarded the train to Hopetown," Stewart commented, "doing the whistle stop tour and touting his message of change — because nothing says 'Look to the future' like rail travel."

Good one, Jon. But it needs some qualification.

First, you were talking about American passenger rail travel, the kind that's been throttled and choked and gutted and ignored for half a century. At the same time that rail freight was easily recognized as a backbone of American transportation, rail transport of American people was constructed as old-fashioned and obsolete after the dismantling of city cable and trolley systems proved so successful. The stunning, ornate Michigan Central train station in Detroit, designed by the same architects who gave Grand Central Station to New York, began its slow decline into hideous neglect at the same time that four-wheeled behemoths with fins and rocket flares sped Detroiters out of the city and into cookie-cutter suburbs that sprouted where farms had just recently been producing food.

New York valued Grand Central, and the city thrives. Detroit let its station become a ruin, and the city clings to life support. Union Station in Chicago rivals a good-sized airport for daily commerce and activity. Michigan Central is an occasional movie set for directors filming stories of apocalypse and desolation.

Yeah Jon, that railroad. Not the comfortable 200-mile-per-hour bullets that fly along the landscapes of Europe and Japan from one modern terminal to another, but the aging, broken, dirty, underfunded silver Amtrak hulks that clack along at a top speed of 55 while passing an endless series of abandoned small-town stations faring only a little better than their big brother in Motown.

But now that we've thoroughly dismissed rail travel, Jon, let's do some math together. I know that numbers in rapid succession tend to make readers' brains explode, so I'll take it slowly.

In 2005, Amtrak burned 66.6 million gallons of diesel fuel. This is a huge number, and a bit diabolical, given all of those sixes. But hold on, because here's another big number: 25.4 million — the total passengers that Amtrak trains moved in the same year. 68

Total fuel divided by total passengers: 2.64 gallons per passenger.

We'll keep this opening equation simple. Some passengers traveled across country from Providence to Los Angeles, and others from Chicago to Milwaukee. Some booked sleeper cars, some stretched out in business class, and most sat in their broken and dirty but comfortable coach seats. All could get caught up on work by plugging in their laptops (trains have standard 110-volt outlets everywhere), or avoid work by listening to music, watching the countryside and cityscapes roll by, playing cards, relaxing. A few might even have commuted from suburb to big city only by train for the entire year. And all burned an average of 2.64 gallons of fuel doing it.

Providence to Los Angeles in a rolling bedroom: two-point-six gallons.

Chicago to Milwaukee, writing a business report: two-point-six gallons.

A year's worth of commuting between work and home while reading the newspaper: two-point-six gallons.

Now let's crank up the mathematics a bit, Jon. Roughly half a million passengers each year, or 1,370 people each day, ride the Pontiac/Detroit to Chicago Amtrak route. There are three trains running the route, so 456 people ride each train. If all 456 of them were driving alone in an SUV getting 15 miles per gallon, they'd burn 21 gallons of fuel each for the 290 mile trip from Detroit to Chicago. Less than one tank; not bad.

Except that there are 456 of those SUVs on the highway, headed west. When they get to the Windy City, they'd refill their tanks to the tune of 9,576 gallons.

According to CSX, one of the nation's largest railroads, trains can move one ton of freight roughly 420 miles on one gallon of fuel. 69 So, ten 200-pound people (we're talking about Americans here) from Detroit can go not only to Chicago but about a hundred miles past it on one gallon, getting 42 miles per gallon per person. To move the remaining 44.6 tons of passengers, the train needs just 45 more gallons of fuel.

In contrast, each of the two SUVs can move half a ton of passengers 75 miles on one gallon of fuel. Two SUVs are required to move a ton, cutting the distance to 37.5 miles. The ten passengers arrive at the same destination a hundred miles past Chicago having gotten 11.2 miles per gallon per person. An additional 499.5 gallons of fuel are needed to drive the other 446 passengers to the same spot.

How's your head, Jon? Just a few more numbers now, to point out that trains have an 11:1 fuel advantage over cars. And with 22 pounds of CO2 released for every gallon of fuel burned, 70 the Detroit-to-Chicago run produces half a ton of carbon dioxide by train, versus five and a half tons by car. That's for just one of the three daily trips made 365 days a year, so the final yearly tally is 55 tons of CO2 produced yearly by train and 6,022 tons by car.

Let's review:

FUEL
Detroit to Chicago, one person per car: 9,576 gallons
Detroit to Chicago, five people per car: 500 gallons
Detroit to Chicago, 456 people per train: 45 gallons

CO2
Detroit to Chicago, yearly, car: 6,022 tons
Detroit to Chicago, yearly, train: 55 tons

Finally, just to mess with you a little more, Jon, try this comparison:

FUEL
Detroit to Chicago, yearly, one person per car:
10,485,720 gallons
Detroit to Chicago, yearly, 456 people per train:
49,275 gallons

CO2
Detroit to Chicago, yearly, car: 115,343 tons
Detroit to Chicago, yearly, train: 542 tons

Gallons of fuel and tons of carbon dioxide pollution saved: ah hell, Jon, you figure it out. My fingers hurt from tapping all of these calculator keys. But here's a hint: the difference is, as one of my colleagues likes to say, "not insubstantial."

Of course, trying to estimate optimal fuel economy for something as enormous as a train is going to have some flaws in the process. And there is a difference between efficiency miles and consumption miles. But CSX is in the train business, and fuel costs affect trains just as much as they do trucks and airplanes, the other two monster machines of transportation. There'd be no benefit for CSX to estimate its fuel economy at 420 ton-miles per gallon if the number was actually lower.

Okay, so, Jon? You know how everyone's in this rabid search for high-efficiency forms of transportation, with an ultra-high rate of fuel economy? And you know how those machines are all symbolic of an intelligent, sustainable, environmentally responsible future where we enjoy energy independence?

Well, guess what? Nothing says 'Look to the future' like rail travel.



====SOURCES====

68 "Amtrak: Energy Efficient Travel." Amtrak Media Relations, June 2006.

69 CSX Transportation, "Take the Clean Air Challenge." www.csx.com; Sharon Begley, "Sounds Good, but...." Newsweek, April 14, 2008.

70 Vermont Earth Institute, "Carbon Worksheet." www.vtearthinstitute.org/carbonwksht.html