The fuel economy standard for passenger cars is 27.5 miles per gallon...But...the purpose of an automobile is to move a passenger...If we assume the average passenger weighs 190 pounds...or almost 0.1 tons, then we could say that a car actually moves 1 ton by 275 miles per gallon.

Pablo, aren't you multiplying by ten when you should be dividing? Single-passenger payload is 0.1 ton, and a gallon moved it 27.5 miles. That's 2.75 ton-miles per gallon, not 275.

You are correct. Massaging these numbers is a losing proposition.

It's well known that a rolling steel wheel beats any other land transportation. Barge traffic on water is better but that can't go everywhere.

The problem that railroads had was union featherbedding. They seem to have solved that so are the best way to go.

Auto makers in the US have union problems but their competition does not.

In the long haul, long distance trucking is a loser.

Click on my name to see the current Oliphant cartoon.

The simple answer is ... NO. Buy local or loose your planet. It's my planet too, there's only one (and it's all connected). It's too simple for the complicated, but plenty of young people seem to be getting it.

I will miss your regular column on Salon but will look for it elsewhere.

It is sad to see this type of column go. While I find your subject matter interesting, I've been most encouraged by the way you chose to reveal your thoughtfulness, research and approach to answering questions we should all be asking. While so many across Salon fill their writing with thoughtless judgments based on trendy "thinking" (SUVs: bad; Farmer's Markets: good), you seem to challenge yourself and your readers to truly think about how we go about our lives.

We cannot sit and wait for government and corporations to address environmental concerns. Change will come too slowly, if ever. Government and corporations, as our representatives and suppliers, will not do anything to reduce our energy consumption if we don't acknowledge the ways in which we must change the ways we live. Our environmental crisis is only solvable if more and more people follow your lead and think about how their daily decisions actually impact the world we live in.

It reminds me of the part of "Through a Scanner Darkly" where everyone's brain is so fried from substance D use that no one can figure out where the extra 3 gears went on the 10 speed. There are 5 gears in the back and 2 in the front, that only adds up to 7. This is the guy telling us how the world works? I mean the numbers simply don't make sense. Think about it more weight moved, more ton-miles/gallon

When CSX talks about moving "a ton of freight more than 423 miles on a single gallon of fuel," they're not counting the weight of the train (which isn't "freight"). So there's no point in including the weight of the car when calculating the ton-miles-per-gallon of a car either. Only the weight of the passengers and cargo in the car is significant for this comparison. Even if the car has four 200-pound passengers and 50 pounds of luggage for each one, that's a total of one ton of (comparable) freight in the car, and at 27.5 miles per gallon that's 27.5 ton-miles per gallon for the loaded car. With one 200-pound passenger and no luggage, it's 2.75 miles per gallon, not 275!

These two errors, of common-sense logic and simple arithmetic, make me nervous about trusting an author billed as a "sustainability engineer."

It's very sad to see Salon getting rid of this column, which is interesting, enlightening, and entertaining. We'll miss you, Pablo.

i quit reading when you said that a car gets 280 ton miles per gallon instead of 2.8. please fix, tks.

Thank you Pablo, for the great column. Am very sad about the budget tightening. But probably even if I give Salon for ALL my holiday gifts it won't be enough.

Here's to changing the world - see you on OpenSalon - and Very best wishes to you and your company. I hope at least you get to keep the green twig behind your ear.

Clearly Pablo has screwed up his math.

For a very thoughtful and more believable analysis of the energy efficiency and other ideas about transportation, check out the blog of Brad Templeton, called brad-ideas.

His essay on energy usage is here:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

Cut Pablo some slack, ok? He divided when he should have multiplied. Yes, it's a mistake -- the kind any one of us could have made, especially when we have other things on our minds.

The main point is that this is an interesting and thought-provoking column. As all of Pablo's columns have been.

If a car weighing 2 tons gets 27.5 mpg, thats 55 ton-miles per gallon, not 13.3. 2 tons move 27.5 mpg, so 1 ton would move twice as far (if the car could be half as light with the same fuel efficiency.)

@wbswhav

great URL. It confirms my suspicions about transportation systems. Some of my own calculations show that a typical bus in an urban driving cycle, would need approximately 8 people on average through its entire shift to reach energy parity with a 30 mpg car. If we ever get any of those 100 mpg plug-in hybrid vehicles, buses become simply uneconomical to run.

@Jeremy Mil

70% of what I consume isn't supplied locally or supplied locally. if you want locally supplied goods, you are going to have to have jobs that don't pay people enough to live on and comes with a high risk of dismemberment or some lesser trauma.

are you willing to give up your "safe" working environment and spend your working hours immersed in grease, breathing cloth fibers, handling sharp pieces of glass and metal, working in extreme heat with drops of liquid metal flying about your face?

are you willing to give up fresh fruits and fresh vegetables for nine months out of the year? Are you willing to eat nothing but canned fruit and vegetable, beans, potatoes, grains, and winter store apples from October through June? (local farmer markets start up in late June/mid July and close in late September)

how are you going to get people to choose nasty jobs like farm labor or industrial factory work? for all the talk of supporting organic farms, if you speak to any farmer in Eastern Massachusetts, you'll hear over and over again that they cannot get labor unless they import it from the Caribbean. Can you imagine how much they would have to pay a local to get them to do the same amount of work? We would not be able to afford the food.

that's what local only commerce means.

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As for the shipping topic, I typically use ground transport because I'm cheap, not because I'm green. Whether it goes by truck or rail, I have no idea. The carrier doesn't tell me and I usually don't have a choice of transportation carriers when I purchase something online.