I’ve only had one occasion to use the rail system in Los Angeles County to commute to a job. This was an IT contract position with the Metropolitan Water District that has its HQ right next to Union Station. Driving to the rail station near-ish my home, although mostly in the wrong direction, was worthwhile mostly to avoid the hellish rush hour traffic to get to that part of the city. Costwise, it was a little less expensive than gas and parking.

But when the job required me to go to a different MWD facility in La Verne, which despite being a good deal farther away was an easy drive with god traffic flow, the advantage of driving my own car immediately obvious.

My work takes me all over the place but that contract was the only time the LA rail system was of any use to me.

Comparing efficiencies to determine this is questionable if the efficiencies are unweighted. It matters little if one system is extravagant in energy usage if the others are not.

One person riding a light rail would have a higher BTU per passenger mile than 100 persons riding the same rail. Kenosha, WI has a much higher BPPM than San Diego for the simple reason that San Diego likely has more riders.

A light rail system has a higher energy overhead than a passenger car because of weight but it’s possible to pack more people into a light rail than an automobile.

So the real question is: knowing that increased ridership increases the efficiency of light rail, would a lower BTU expenditure be possible if ridership of current light rail systems were maximized as compared to other forms of transportation (also maximized)?

The analyzis that produced this graph doesn’t answer that question.

Why People Don’t Use Mass Transit- Steven Dutch

Apart from the cost of wages, economic planners rarely acknowledge the value of individual time, but that has absolutely no impact on the reality that people themselves do put value on their time.

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There are plenty of good reasons to encourage mass transit, but arguments about the hidden costs of the automobile fall on deaf ears because people, unconsciously or not, factor time and convenience into their decision making. The average driver knows perfectly well why she drives.

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/MassTransit.HTM

I lived in the Hampton Roads Metropolitan Area when Norfolk and Virginia Beach were planning a multibillion dollar light rail line. The planned line was designed to do only one thing (although that’s not how they promoted it): get poor workers from the “projects” in Norfolk to the hotels and restaurants on Virginia Beach. Virginia Beach has little parking, and the hotel and restaurant owners didn’t want employees using up parking spots with their clunker cars. That’s why they sought funding for the light rail boondoggle. They could have accomplished the same thing with less money by adding a few more metro transit buses (or, as “Coyote” notes, by giving all the poor employees Priuses).

The problem is, I do not think that the progressive light rail folks are concerned so much with energy efficiency as they are concerned with making every one live a dense urban lifestyle. Exactly why utopian socialist thinkers have always wanted to have most of humanity grouped into urban living I cannot answer, but it does seem if you examine all of their solutions to the world problems, it involved moving people away from free living (guns, rural, self-reliant, self contained transportation, etc) to a more controlled environment (urban communal solutions to all problems).