Carbon footprint per passenger mile

Carbon per passenger mile chart

For those of you wondering what the carbon impact is between walking, riding and driving, the folks at the Sightline Institute, a nonprofit sustainability research center, provides an answer with clarity.

Some insights from the graph:

- You can’t get much greener than a walkable community.
- It’s easy to see why SUVs get such a bad rap, though a solo hybrid is no better than a 3-person SUV carpool.
- It’s easy to see why hybrids get such good press, though that’s only when it’s compared to other cars with the same number of passengers.
- The best way to calculate carbon impact per car passenger is to divide the carbon impact for a solo driver by the number of passengers.
- A 4-person carpool is greener than transit only if everyone else is 4-person carpooling as well. In other words, an infrastructure that allows a 4-person carpool is going to attract ten times as many solo drivers.
- You can’t get much greener than a walkable community. Worth repeating. Even more worth executing.