Conservation of energy in the urban passenger sector: A general principle and some proposals

We are faced by a large number of competing proposals for energy conservation, and this paper proposes a straightforward principle for choosing among them: “The Law of Large Proportions.” The Law is a simple one—The Biggest Components Matter Most—but it has been largely ignored by much of the government-formulated energy policy so far.The paper applies the Law to the urban transportation sector, and concludes that the major hope for conserving transportation energy is to drop our preoccupation with public transit and, instead, to concentrate on the goal of “civilizing” the automobile. The paper, then, proposes three ideas that might accomplish this: two different ways of promoting the sale of fuel-efficient vehicles, and one way of improving the efficiency of the existing vehicle fleet.