Airports seem to be built with no concept of door to door travel time. For sample, SF to LA by plane. Use muni to get to BART, wait for BART, take it to the little airport train thing, then a line at checkin, security, and all the long walks in between.
Overnight self-driving sleeper Uber will be a vastly superior experience. It's a sign of how we're moving backwards despite all the technology.
It's an environmental catastrophe if the best travel experience is also the least efficient.
It's the same for busses, boats, etc.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2015/04/debate-settled-flying-way-effi...
I don't think it's fair to say that it's "certainly" not true, as this study has not been reviewed and plenty of reasonable people believe that the evidence suggests a different conclusion. Here's a fairly straightforward critique of its methodology:
https://thinkprogress.org/no-flying-is-not-greener-than-driv...
In fact, can you name any other study which comes to the same conclusion as this one?
I agree the original article isn't great, but the one you offered is equally insubstantial. It shouldn't be shocking to find the trip type impacts the energy use.
I think that what it's saying is this:
* The most wasteful car trips are solo local commutes. Carbon-per-inch, flying is more efficient than driving when the driving is a solo local commutes.
* For longer trips, in a light duty vehicle like a sedan or SUV, driving usually smashes flying. If you have 4 people in the car, even in an inefficient car, you are using less than half the fuel of those same people flying.
The Michigan study simply averaged these together, which is obviously senseless because there is no flight equivalent of a 3-mile commute. It only makes sense to compare flights against highway mileage, and it's not unfair to assume >= 2.2 people in the car.
That's the way I read the critique.
I spent some of a 4 hour delay walking this path.
The blue dotted line, go north then along the river: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/51.1581/-0.1632
One bus followed by one train. It certainly took less time (and way less money) than Uber was estimating.
Yup, we should have a luggage drop wagon on board of the BART, and the BART should drop us at our gate. Obviously that implies the BART is also a giant TSA irradiation oven (Want to opt out? Well, there's the taxi).