Metrics

Walking a mile requires about 100 calories or 116 watt-hours.  Calculations of fuel efficiencies. Bikes are 10-20 watt-hour/mile. DOE Transportation Energy Data Book

Mode	Passengers-vehicle	BTU’s	passenger-mile	passenger-km	FTE
			Watt-hours	Watt-hours
Freight Railroads		22	6	4	1
JPods	1.57	260	78	47	13
Performance Standard	1.57	954	280	174	47
Van pool	6.1	1322	389	242	65
Motorcycles	1.2	1855	545	339	91
Rail, Amtrak	20.5	2650	779	484	130
Rail, Transit (light & heavy)	22.5	2784	818	508	136
Rail, Commuter	31.3	2996	881	548	147
Air, domestic	96.2	3261	959	596	160
Cars	1.57	3512	1032	641	172
Personal trucks	1.72	3944	1159	720	193
Bus, Transit	8.8	4235	1245	774	208
Taxi, demand response	1	14301	4204	2613	701

Source on cost per passenger-mile. Cars are $0.592 per vehicle-mile according to AAA is adjusted by the 1.57 passengers/car reported by DOE.  The 1.57 Load is also applied to JPods costs of $0.04 per vehicle-mile. Example Ton-mile per gallon calculations (link):

10X is required to drive a paradigm shift

Cost	Typical	JPods	Times Better		Background
Capital cost of light rail	$202 million/mile	$20 million/mile	10X		$million per mile to build (light rail verses JPods)
Capital costs of newcar ownership.	$10,728	0	10X		JPods provide Mobility As a Service.
Cents per vehicle mile traveled.	63.74¢	.04¢	10X		Graph above is per passenger-mile using government estimation of 1.57 people per car.
Traffic accident costsper American per year	$1,035	$0.00	10X		Morgantown’s PRT has had 5 minor injuries in 50 years. Roads have 4.5 million injuries per year.
Road injuries permillion people per year	11,200	0.9 to 3.4	10X		Injuries per million using US DOT regulations versus ASTM F24 regulations.
Human Factors
Access	Afford cars	8 ys and older	6X		% that cannot drive/operate, under 5 years old
Congestion	48	5	10X		Hours lost to congestion each year
Capacity, Cars	4800	28,000	6X		*4 seats every 3 seconds for cars and .5 seconds for JPods
Capacity, Bus	600	28,000	10X		*Busfive minutes apart with 50 seats verses JPods
Capacity, Trains	1200	28,000	10X		*Trains 10 min apart with 200 seats verses JPods
					*JPods can have multiple rails is same right of way
Environmental
Pollution per passenger-mile	~.5 pound	0	10X		See graph above converted from energy required per passenger-mile.
Land Use	2,642	29	10X		Square feet per vehicle
Security
Defense	492 billion	Self-reliance	10X		1% the estimated cost of Iraq War
Trade Deficit	584 billion	Self-reliance	10X		2006 Trade Deficit for cars and oil
Currency Value	Cause	Self-reliance	10X		Foreign oil addiction weakens the dollar
Peak Oil	Cause	Self-reliance	10X		US Peak Oil was in 1970
Climate Change	Cause	Self-reliance	10X		Mobility within a solar budget

Family Car Costs

Each car:

• Costs American families between $5,262 and $10,728 per year.
• Are parked 95% of the time.
• Consume 16% of our income ($813/monrh).

• The average car costs $9,282/year, is parked 95% of the time, with 85% of car costs draining out of the local economy. Oil imports are 6.7 mb/d of foreign oil at $87, a yearly drain of $213 billion.

Ride-hail:

• Even in the cheapest areas, fares now cost $2 per mile or more. In El Paso, Texas trips averaged $2.10 per mile in 2023 dollars, making it the most affordable U.S. city for Uber passengers, according to research by Netcredit. Detroit took a close second at $2.11.
• However, fares ran higher in larger urban centers, especially northern ones. Riders paid $2.56 per mile in 2023 dollars in Los Angeles, $4.32 in New York City, and $3.25 in San Francisco.

Injury Rates per Million

Injury rates per million people (details):

• 11,200 serious injuries per million people on roads using DOT standards.
• 3.7 injuries per million on theme park thrill rides using ASTM International F24 standards.
  • Morgantown PRT has had 5 minor injuries since President Nixon sent his daughter Tricia to open this first grade-separated network of self-driving cars in 1972.
  • Wuppertal suspended train (grade-separated) had one fatal incident since it opened in 1901.

Life Requires Energy, Disposable Energy

Disposable Energy measures how much energy people can buy with their take-home-pay. How much energy can people afford to pursuit happiness. How much energy can labor buy to apply to building economic momentum.

Parasitic Energy Ratio

This is a simplified way to measure relative waste of various modes of transportation. Divide the Gross Mass by the Payload Mass and multiply by the number of start-stops on a trip.

• Gross Mass is the 4,000 pound car or 6,000 pounds of train/bus per passenger plus the 200 pounds of the passenger.
• Payload Mass is the 200 pounds of the person.
• 10 or some number of stations or stop light experienced on a trip.

Moving a two tons to move a person in repetitively start-stop traffic is very expensive, wasteful, and polluting Steps to put this metric in personal terms:

1. Park your car in your driveway empty of gasoline.
2. Put in one gallon into your tank.
3. Get 5 of your strongest friends (watt-hours per persons).
4. Drive until you run out of gas.
5. Push your car home. It will take you between 3 (very hard working friends) to 7 (normal person) days working 8 hours a day.

Economic Work as measured by Costs per Passenger-mile

The following graph uses MassDOT data to compare cost per passenger-mile and pollution per passenger-mile for various modes of transportation. Cost per trip, 2024. Solar-powered mobility networks have no operational pollution and much lower cost of operation.

• Mass transit buses produce more pollution per passenger-mile than cars.
• Mass transit trains are nearly as polluting as cars.

Trip distance

DOE link

Net Energy

Economically useful energy per unit of energy required to obtain that energy. Oil used to be 100:1 but has depleted to 3:1. Solar is 25:1 for wind and 20:1 for photovoltaics. Very good 18 minute summary of Energy Economics.  Candidates and policies that support improved Net Energy will create jobs from surplus energy.

Energy Security

Life requires energy. Risks to energy supplies are currently not measured. A metric is needed for Thomas Edison was correct when he observed in 1910 that:

“Sunshine is spread out thin and so is electricity. Perhaps they are the same, Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy.” “Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property. “There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces. Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen….”

Quality of Service

• Charting Public Transit’s Decline

Food Metrics

A typical person needs about 2,000 food calories, or 2,000 kcal per day with little physical activity. This equates to 2.33 kWh or 1 megawatt-hour per year. People who are physically active it may be significantly higher (30 – 150% more).

Energy Consumption

The typical American uses 88.5 megaWatt-Hours of energy per year. Cutting all energy use 45% would put the average American at 48.7 megaWatt-Hours, or roughly the same as the 47.2 megaWatt-Hours used by the average German.

Economic Work

energy and transportation should thought of aspects of creating and delivering economic value.  The physics definition of work is force applied to mass. The economy is a momentum artifact, a flywheel of labor applying energy to produce, store and distribute energy. Life requires energy.  If I had a choice, money would be back by energy, not debt or gold. Ref:  “Is the technology off the shelf ready?” The technology to power our lives within a solar budget are mundane. If you can ride vertically in an elevator, why should you not be able to go horizontally by similar mechanism? JPods are incredibly simple mechanics and clever software programming. You can see similar technologies:

• At Kiva Systems ($33 million investment from Bain Capital in mid-2000s and sold themselves to
• The Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) network built in Morgantown, WV as a solution to the 1973 Oil Embargo has delivered 110 million oil-free, injury-free passenger-miles (link to video, Congressional Office of Technology Assessment study PB-244854, audit and letter from the Mayor of Morgantown).
• Hyperloop and ET3. Why are governments funding magnetic levitation of a thousand-ton train when a 400 pound pod can be deviated in a vacuum tube and travel using 1/50th the energy.

Metrics for Sustainable Infrastructure are:

• Disposable Energy
• Net Energy
• CO2 per Passenger-mile (per unit of Economic Work)
• Economic Work, Cost per Passenger-mile (per unit of Economic Work)
• Parasitic Energy Ratio

Real Estate Consumption versus Green Space Recovery

Gas Prices as Unemployment Forecaster

US Oil Production As Metric of Economic Security

“Energy resources are the reserve account behind currency. The economy can grow as long as there is surplus affordable energy in that account.” Art Berman The energy behind the US dollar is depleting at the rate of 1 million barrel per day per year. The Law of Supply and Demand has been clear since US Peak Oil in 1970. As US oil fields depleted gas prices ratched higher at an average of 7.3% per year, 14.1% since China and India became significant importers in 1998. Note that US Federal debt increased in tandem with oil imports. It is likely gas prices will jump much higher as the dollar loses its monopoly in the world oil-trade. China is to force the Saudis to start trading in the Yuan. To change the energy behind their economies:

• Saudi Arabia announced their $2 trillion “Post-oil Era” fund.
• China announced a $50 trillion solar grid.
• There is a $100 Trillion Shift From ‘Just-In-Time’ To ‘Just-In-Case’ energy.
• Currently the Federal government is protecting their oil-powered monopoly and failing to warn the American people they must adapt to become energy self-reliant, 1 Mb/d Oil Depletion Vs. EIA’s Rosy Forecast

Changing the lifeblood of American from oil to ingenuity will create millions of jobs, save families a car payment per month. The risk in America is that the crisis of 2008 will repeat by between 2017 and 2020 as gas prices crush jobs. Since Peak Fracking in June 2015 the US has the equivalent of one 1973 Oil Embargo less energy. By 2017 this will be three. It will be a nightmare. Steps to take:

• Recognize Illicit Energy, dependence on energy outside self-reliance. Federal support for Illicit Energy from foreign oil repeats the Path to War of Federal support for Illicit Energy from slavery.
• Face the brutal fact that US Peak Oil was in 1970.
• Leverage transportation as the catalyst for changing energy systems

Transportation, the Catalyst for Changing Energy Systems

Transportation has always been the catalyst for changing energy systems:

• Paddle a canoe, build a water wheel.

• Sail a boat, build a windmill.

• Ride a horse, harness a horse to a plow.

• Railroads in the 1860s allowed the extraction industries to scale from $100 a barrel for oil to $3.

• JPods and other solar-powered mobility networks will result in displacing fossil fuels with solar.

As with the near century of rotary dial telephones under Federal monopoly, the barrier to transportation innovation is the unconstitutional Federal highway monopoly. Here is a 2006 Fox News story on the gargage quality JPods network. FastCompany article with excellent links to metrics: 12 foolproof ways to get cars out of cities Fox News Story JPods 2006, Garage Quality from Bill James on Vimeo. https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/f… http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/livability/fact_sheets/transandhousing.cfm https://www.mikeontraffic.com/numbers-every-traffic-engineer-should-know/ What does America spend on transportation and infrastructure? Is transportation infrastructure improving?