What is the most efficient means of transport? It can be measured in different ways: time, private cost, social cost, surface area used, comfort, CO2 particles emitted, etc.
It is not clear which is the best means of transport. For example, if the most important thing is to travel comfortably while listening to an audiobook, the best option might be a luxury car, whereas if you are a Greenpeace activist and you care about the environment at all costs, perhaps walking would be best.
In Santiago, a person can easily travel 15 km every day to work. The time it takes to do this by car fluctuates a lot depending on the schedule. For example: if you go from the Maipú Temple to La Moneda (about 15.5 km), in a time without traffic it would take 15 minutes (Google Maps), while with traffic using the route recommended by Waze on a Thursday at 8:30, the estimated time is 41 minutes.
When a trip can extend to more than double due to the schedule, the scarce good is the road surface time: vehicle surface * travel time, which represents how long you are using the streets, but weighted by the size of the vehicle.
For the same 10 km trip, different vehicles can be chosen. For example, if you walk, you take longer but use less surface, while if you go by car it is much faster but you use a larger surface. Below is a graph showing this indicator for different vehicle options.
You can download the calculation details by clicking here.
The most interesting thing about this analysis is: Walking is not efficient, a car with 4 passengers is quite good, a bus where everyone is seated (40 passengers) is almost identical to a bicycle, while the winner is the full bus (100 passengers).
Another way to see this is that if no one used a car with one passenger, it would be equivalent to having at least twice as many streets in a city.
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