How much carbon emissions does a average double decker bus give off a year?

Question

debate HELP

Answer 1

While it's fairly easy to find CO2 figures for cars, finding a reliable source for a bus seems to be a lot harder, wonder why??

Using the info on this site...

http://www.transportdirect.info/Web/Temp...

which gives a per passenger figure of 89.1g/km for a bus.

At first, this compares quite well with a car, even a very efficient car emits 110-120g/km CO2, but the bus figure assumes the bus is new, rather than the belching smokescreen-creating things that frequent our towns, and also assumes that the bus is full, which they're often not.

A bus driver told me once he did about 200 miles a day, and his bus took about 70 passengers. So it can be taken that a bus emits 89.1x70 g/km which equals a rather frigtening-looking 6,237 g/km CO2! While the figure for the car will also rise with 4 people on board, it won't be 4 times the figure, or anywhere near it!

Using those figures, it would appear that a bus emits somewhere in the region of 730 tonnes of CO2 in a year, compared to an average car doing an average mileage, which emits about 4 tonnes in a year.

Not looking so green now, are you, Mr Bus?

Answer 2

I' m afraid I can't give you exact figure; there are several hundred thousand buses in service in rhe U.K. ranging from brand new to over 20 years old; the good news is that all buses manufactured over the past  two years or so and being manufactured now,m have very low emission engines indeed, and some run on hydrogen cell batteries rather than oil; indeed a modern bus loaded with 72 people in the rush hour produces about the same number of emisions as two private cars.  Additonally the benefits of mass bus travel to and from our larger towns is to reduce congestion pollution and carbon emissions overall; the situation will improve year on year as older buses are phased out.