Carbon footprint per passenger mile

For those of you wondering what the carbon impact is between walking, riding and driving, the folks at the Sightline Institute, a nonprofit sustainability research center, provides an answer with clarity.

Some insights from the graph:

– You can’t get much greener than a walkable community.
– It’s easy to see why SUVs get such a bad rap, though a solo hybrid is no better than a 3-person SUV carpool.
– It’s easy to see why hybrids get such good press, though that’s only when it’s compared to other cars with the same number of passengers.
– The best way to calculate carbon impact per car passenger is to divide the carbon impact for a solo driver by the number of passengers.
– A 4-person carpool is greener than transit only if everyone else is 4-person carpooling as well. In other words, an infrastructure that allows a 4-person carpool is going to attract ten times as many solo drivers.
– You can’t get much greener than a walkable community. Worth repeating. Even more worth executing.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *