One effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from road traffic is to travel more people in the same vehicle.
If 50 people travel in an electric bus, the emission will be 11 times less than if they travel by electric car – and 36 times less than if they travel by a fossil fueled car.
Thank you for traveling together.
With data from IVL, the Swedish Environmental Research Institute, we have calculated the vehicles' carbon dioxide emissions for their entire life cycle (manufacturing and operation).
The graph shows the carbon dioxide emissions if 50 people choose electric bus (181g CO₂/km), compared to if the corresponding number travel by electric car (50/1.4x58g CO₂/km when charging with Swedish electric mix) or fossil car (50/1.4x182g CO₂/km). In the calculation, we have assumed that 1.4 people travel in each car, which is the Swedish average based on statistics from 2021.
It requires more emissions to manufacture an electric bus than a car, but the environmental impact is compensated with less emissions when there are many of us who travel by electric bus.
| Manufacture | Driving | Total/km | |
| Electric bus | 146 | 35 | 181 |
| Electric | 51 | 7 | 58 |
| Fossil car | 32 | 150 | 182 |
Determining the environmental impact... on the website of the Publications Office of the EU
Use our climate calculator below to see how much you emit – based on which vehicle you choose, and how many people you are traveling with. Choose your number of travelers and see the CO₂ emissions per kilometer per person.
If we are to achieve our climate goals, we need to share resources. Moving from cars to public transport is an efficient and smart way to reduce emissions quickly. A solution that is already in place!
That's why we want to talk about the climate benefits of public transport. To meet the climate goals, we need to travel more together. We have visualized this by setting up the vehicles' total emissions in a classic chart, but in a new version.
The cars in the diagram account for how many times more CO₂ they emit compared to the electric bus. There are eleven electric cars because the electric car emits eleven times more CO₂ than the electric bus and 36 fossil cars because they emit 36 times more than the electric bus.
We have calculated with 50 people in a bus because it highlights the potential, that everyone can fit with a good margin, in a single bus. 1.4 people is the 2021 average for the number of people in a car in Sweden.
Feel free to test our climate calculator above to see how emissions are affected depending on how many people travel in each vehicle.
The electric car is much better than the fossil car, but still worse than the bus. The electrification of the car fleet is necessary, but not sufficient for us to achieve our climate goals. In addition , the region is expected to grow by several hundred thousand inhabitants in the next few years, and electric cars will not reduce queues or congestion. We need fewer cars on the roads.
Our electric bus fleet is growing all the time. Right now we have just over 300 electric buses in the region. In 2023, we will deploy another 160 new electric buses and when the year is over, almost two out of three city buses will run on electricity.
Our goal is that public transport in cities in the region will be entirely run on electricity by 2030.