When I was planning for the last Blogher conference in Chicago in 2007, I had a bunch of people ask why I wasn’t taking the train (answer: It took too long). This year, thanks to a new study, no one’s asked me the train question — yet.

Train trips aren’t necessarily greener than plane trips, found Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Their study (PDF) looked not just at the carbon emissions of trips themselves, but also the emissions created by the infrastructure needed for the travel modes (i.e. train stations) and the types of fuel used.

After all, even electric trains have huge carbon footprints if that electricity’s created by burning coal. And if nighttime buses are running nearly empty, the per-passenger carbon footprint of your post-bar bus ride home’s gonna be pretty big — even bigger than that of an SUV.

Of course, this kind of finding doesn’t simply mean that flying’s the greenest way to travel — or that you should drive your SUV to the bar. Besides the drunk driving issue, off-peak hour buses, even if never packed, give people the ability rely on public transportation for all their transit needs — thereby taking more cars off the road and more people on the bus during peak hours.

Instead, this Berkeley study points to a need for smart urban planning. As Catherine Brahic of NewScientist’s Environment blog reports:

Any government considering expanding its rail network should take into account the emissions it will generate in doing so, Chester says. Setting up a public transportation system that only a small proportion of the population uses could generate more emissions than it cuts, he adds – especially if trains and buses are not well connected….

“New rail systems should serve as links to other transit modes, as is often the case in Europe and Japan,” he says. “We should avoid building rail systems that are disconnected from major population areas and require car trips and parking to access.”

Basically, traveling by rail can be much greener — if lots of people can get to the stations WITHOUT DRIVING — and if we power electric trains with renewable energy. From a practical standpoint, the trains’ll need to be faster too! In fact, a new HNTB’s America THINKS survey found that Americans would love to travel by high speed rail:

More than half of Americans (54 percent) would choose modern high-speed trains over automobile (33 percent) and air travel (13 percent) if fares and travel time were about the same.

And thanks to Obama’s commiting $8 billion to high speed rail, Americans could get what they want. Of course, lots of people still already love taking train trips, even if our trains aren’t moving at high speeds yet. Amtrak’s new ad tries to show why train travel can be a lot more relaxing than fighting car traffic or navigating airport security (via Streetsblog LA):

Alas — while I’d like to travel in relaxedly on a train, I’d need to give up 4 work days (2 each way) to rail it to Chicago. Thus, Southwest it is — but I eagerly await those high speed trains….

Photo by Professor Bop

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