How Many Lightbulbs Does It Take To Turn A Streetcar?

Every day, nearly empty (1 - 3 passenger in all) streetcars rumble down Queen Street East, obviously wasting huge amounts of energy. Lets assume that these light loads make up 8 hours each and every day, not unreasonable at all considering there are only the two rush hours periods where the cars are full. 8 hours, at an average of a car every 12 minutes, is 40 runs. Huge cars with nobody in them. Each articulated streetcar weighs about 40 tons. It takes a lot of power to move those behemoths along, with starting and stopping every few hundred metres. These Articulated Light Rail Vehicles have 4 65 kilowatt motors in them, 250 kilowatts in all. Running for an hour, that is 250 kilowatt hours. Since it takes about 15 minutes to travel from the Victoria Park Loop to Kingston Road where the cars start getting fuller, that part of their trip uses up 60 kilowatt hour of electricity. 40 runs consume a whopping 2400 kilowatt hours a day. Times 365 days in a year, a total of 880 megawatts hours.

We are constantly being told that "Every Kilowatt Counts". The Ontario Power Authority claims that it's much ballyhooed Compact Fluorescent Lights program saved 250 megawatt hours per year throughout the whole province. Meanwhile, the TTC manages to piddle away more than that running empty streetcars on Queen East. Add in the rest of Queen, St Clair, Duffer in and the rest, it takes a staggering amount of coal generated electricity to move a handful of people a few kilometres. Yet our million dollar salaried state run electricity monopoly keeps on raving about compact fluorescents. What part of that makes sense.?

Fine print: These calculations are based on information from the TTC, transit related and OPA websites. More accurate information might change a few decimal places in these calculations. Someone correct me if I am calculator or fact checking challenged.