BRT And Global Warming

Rob Wrenn reports that:

Last night's Climate Action Workshop hosted by the Transportation Commission went very well. BRT was presented along with implementing the bike plan and some other actions as one thing to do to reduce CO2. And the intern who is working with Timothy Burroughs, Chris Ganson, presented some actual numbers about how much CO2 emissions would be reduced by BRT.

His numbers are:
BRT with diesel buses would reduce CO2 by 2307 tons a year
BRT with zero emissions buses would reduce CO2 by 10,211 tons.

For attributing these numbers, this is what Timothy Burroughs told me: "You are welcome to use the numbers we presented. For giving credit, I would say something like 'initial estimates as presented by the City team working on developing Berkeley's climate action plan' ..."

Here is what Chris Ganson told me about the figures:

The savings are for the whole corridor, which I admit makes applying them in their entirety to measure G potentially misleading. Though, one could argue that the City of Berkeley has the power to hold the whole thing up, making the whole system subject to our jurisdiction. In any case, it would be quite difficult to figure out where to draw the line to look at Berkeley emissions only.

The numbers are calculated from VMT data in the energy section of the BRT EIR, and include life cycle vehicle emissions from both cars and buses. I assumed both buses and autos retain the same fleet/vehicle stock average gas mileage they presently have, and I used standard multipliers to convert gas and diesel into CO2. For the ZEV bus scenario, I assumed the buses had no operational emissions but continued to be responsible for the rest of their life cycle emissions."