“You can’t understand a city without using its public transportation system.”
---- Erol Ozan
Introduction (Overview)
Life cycle assessments (LCAs) have been at the forefront of many decisive pieces of environmental legislation; serving municipalities, governments, and companies as a tool for decision making. LCAs form a framework to assess complex interconnective systems through the development of models based on a set of criteria. Students will develop individual LCAs with regards to the District of Columbia’s public transportation system and decide which mode of transportation (i.e., bus, Uber, electric scooter, or metro) will be most energy efficient measured in terms of megajoules per passenger mile and grams of CO2 equivalence per passenger mile. This three-week unit will integrate the physical principles of energy efficiency (i.e., conservation of energy and entropy) with economics (i.e., cost per kWh for metro, daily ridership cost). The various energies and their subsequent transformations have constraints with regards to their utility with current modern technologies which will be discussed as students delve deeper in the evaluation phase of the unit. The locality of each student will likely affect their overall decision(s) based on availability of resources, distance from school and access to public transportation in their surrounding neighborhoods. The development of the LCA will facilitate a greater depth of knowledge, critical thinking, and engagement as students explore the complexities of one simple question: how should I get to school?
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