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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Much of my car's wear and tear is from age, so I can discount some amount of that that. Free parking is plentiful in 95% of both cities.

Driving 1 person is already close to the price of a train ticket. Driving 2 people is ~50% discounted. Driving 2 people, and then not having to rent a car/taxi, is something like a ~75% discount.

With a real carbon tax, these numbers would look a lot closer to eachother.

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With a real carbon tax these numbers would actually be further apart. I was surprised to learn that in the real world trains are not more efficient than a the average car when measured in passenger mile per gallon equivalent. And trains are much less efficient when compared to a high MPG cars like a Prius. In fact I'd be willing to bet that there are only a few of city/regional public transportations systems in the world that are more energy efficient than just taking your Prius.

https://theicct.org/blogs/staff/planes-trains-and-automobile...

Interestingly, the Swiss railway system publishes real-world figures on its Co2 efficiency per passenger-kilometer. [https://www.mobitool.ch/de/tools/vergleichsrechner-15.html, german-only, un nfortunately]

They report some 80 passenger-km per liter of Diesel equivalent energy, compared to 13 passenger-km in a modern hybrid. Both values include the energy production, utilization and energy expenditure for infrastructure.

This assumes a modern network with electric trains though. I'm not sure if the article you cited still uses diesel-powered trains to arrive at such extremely different figures.

But that's just looking at fuel efficiency. What about the carbon cost of manufacture? How long does a train car stay in service vs a prius? What is the cost to manufacture a train car vs individual prii for n passengers?

Depends where you want to go in the city and what you want to do. Portland has some hellish traffic at times, and free parking isn't as plentiful as you describe. The inner suburbs all have metered parking on 2+ lane streets, and extremely competitive side street parking. Plus, the west side suburbs have zoned parking to keep out non-locals: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/39277

Taking a bike is a much easier thing to do if you want easy access to the inner burbs and urban core of Portland.

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