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Is it greener to travel by bus or by car?

If you’ve ever looked at an almost empty bus and wondered how it can be a viable proposition from the twin perspectives of cost and pollution, you’re not alone. Astonishingly, even the local authorities and companies that run the buses apparently have no means of comparing bus and  car travel.

So I’m going to provide the hard figures for them. For years, government has been using environmental reasons to encourage public transport use. But where is the evidence that buses are cleaner per passenger-kilometre than cars?

When lobby group the Alliance of British Drivers (ABD) asked councils to provide figures for bus passenger occupancy per kilometre, only two did so. One, Sheffield City Council, revealed that during the morning rush hour (7-10am) its buses carried only 2.3 passengers per kilometre. The average bus occupancy was a shade under 12 people.

Then there are the buses themselves. When we buy a new diesel car, it must conform to the latest Euro 6 emissions legislation. According to the ABD’s research, the majority of the UK’s diesel buses are Euro 3, the standard of 16 years ago. Brian Gregory of the ABD said: “Even if they upgraded their fleets to Euro 5, it wouldn’t lower harmful emissions.”  Indeed it wouldn’t. Sheffield City Council admitted: “On-road measurements indicate the NOx [nitrogen oxide] emissions performance of the newer Euro 5 double-decker buses is similar to its predecessors. The Euro 5 single-decker buses generate more NOx than their predecessors.”

Compare vehicles, and bus journeys don’t fare favourably against cars.

By James Foxall   Telegraph