I was in Dublin at the weekend and because I had the time, I travelled there by train and ferry. Instead of driving to Luton or Stansted and flying to Dublin and getting a lift or taxi to the conference venue I was dropped off in Northampton, took a train from Northampton to Milton Keynes, changed onto the Holyhead train and got the ferry to Dublin. And I travelled back the same way too getting the bus back from Northampton to my home.
The outward journey involved a train at Northampton at 0905 and an arrival in Dublin at 1730; coming back I caught an 0805 ferry and got home at 1910. Now that sounds like quite a long time, I guess, compared with a flight, but when you add in ‘hanging around in airports’ time and ‘stuck in traffic jams’ time then it reduces the difference quite a lot. But, I admit, when I had a proper job I wouldn’t have considered this way of travelling for very long as it looks like a time indulgence. But when your work involves thinking, writing and answering emails and phone calls, as mine seems to, then my journey gave me plenty of work time. There was free wifi on the ferry and I sat with a coffee and a croissant working away for several hours. I also saw some lovely views of Snowdonia with snow.
If we now consider the financial cost of the journey the comparisons come out very much in favour of my journey compared with a flight. We are fooled into thinking we have cheap flights but the extras add up, the airport car parking can cost as much as the flight and the costs of reaching an airport can be high too. How much do you think a return rail and ferry journey from Northampton to Dublin costs? Mine cost £78. Fantastic value, wouldn’t you agree? Going by plane would almost certainly have cost about twice as much (so my hosts at the Irish Raptor Study Group benefitted from my journey choice). And here’s a tip I am happy to pass on: when using a rail planner enter your destination port as your destination (in my case Dublin) rather than your departure port (in my case Holyhead). If, as I did initially, you look at the rail fare and the ferry fare separately then you’ll pay an awful lot more (around or over twice as much – you just have to know, or luckily stumble across, how the system works).
The carbon cost of the alternative journeys are a little difficult to calculate. It’s not easy to find a workable carbon calculator to help you make your decisions, in my experience. I used this one and I have no idea whether its findings are accurate or not, but if they are, then the carbon emissions from my journey were about a quarter of those of a flight. Does anyone know a better or similar carbon calculator for journeys?
The assumption of everyone was that people arrive in Dublin on planes – I think I was regarded as slightly eccentric for my chosen mode of travel (what fun!). And I have quite a lot of ingrained resistance to public transport as being difficult that I have to get over. But I feel rather virtuous about having travelled the way I did (you can tell can’t you?) as the journey was enjoyable, the cost was cheaper and the carbon emitted was much less. I am slightly slowly shaking myself out of a mindset which assumes that public transport is difficult, expensive and not for me. It’s a journey you know?
[registration_form]
A further tip for train travel – take a look at ‘split-ticketing’.
This is where you buy tickets for stations along the way to your final destination rather than one ticket. As an example:
Day return from Leamington Spa to Winnersh – cost if bought as that: £94.70
However…
Leamington Spa – Banbury day return: £10.00 and
Banbury – Winnersh day return: £26.40.
The main ‘restriction’ is that your train must stop at the intermediate station(s) in this case, Banbury. And no, you don’t have to leave and rejoin the train.
There are a couple of web sites that will work out the journey for you (and take a % of the saving) but once you get the hang of it, you can do it yourself.
I believe that there are moves afoot to stop split ticketing.
Clarification – moves to end any price advantage of split tickets (i.e. to ensure that end to end tickets are the cheapest option. You would still be able to buy split tickets if you wished.
The rail ticket price issue even hit the news last night. As expected the usual placatory phrases about looking at it and addressing it were offered. Ever an agnostic ….
Oh, how true – flights £20, parking twice as much.
I half caught something on the News yesterday saying that train companies will in future be compelled to sell the cheapest ticket – at the cost of split ticketing where that is cheaper.
And once you qualify for a Senior Railcard it’s all 33% less – one of the benefits of getting older!
Thanks for that. It’s good to see someone in the conservation field taking CO2 seriously in their choices. Very valid points about cost in money, the extras on flights and how the time can be used too.
It seems too often that those in conservation don’t work hard enough at reducing their personal impact, on the grounds that their work is important – which it is of course. There is an element of setting an example however, and having integrity when one is calling on others to reduce their impact. As organisations which drive 4x4s all over nature reserves should consider!
But you left out the most important part – you can do a lot more birding from a train and ferry than from the plane.
I take your point about the ‘extra’ costs often wiping the advantages of cheap air tickets (see here for a nice view on this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6pj3Fdbwng) and it is also true that the speed of air travel is offset by all the waiting around, checking in etc. However, even allowing for these things there is still often a strong time and financial advantage to the flight option over other modes of transport. For example the cheapest return rail fare I found to travel to Bristol from Newcastle when checking this morning was £152 whilst the cheapest Easyjet flight was £95. The difference substantially exceeds the additional cost of getting from the airport into central Bristol and the small differences in the cost of getting to and from the airport in Newcastle compared to the railway station. Likewise even with the waiting around at airports I would still gain several hours by flying rather than taking the train. When I used to make this journey regularly my client was happy to pay the extra (indeed preferred to, for environmental reasons) for me to travel by train but it is easy enough to understand that for many people these advantages to air travel will make the choice a ‘no brainer’.
If we wish people to travel by the most environmentally sustainable mode of transport we need the ticket costs to reflect the overall cost to society since most people are either insufficiently aware of the relative environmental impacts of different forms of transport or if they are aware are unwilling to pay a premium for an environmentally less harmful option.
We had an interesting trip in the 1990s at the start of a sailing holiday in Orkney – we took a freight ferry from Invergordon to Kirkwall. It was much cheaper than the passenger ferry but had the slight disadvantage that we had to board by 4.30 am. However, we had a double cabin with its own shower room and a full Scottish breakfast was included in the fare.
For rail travellers there is a new website which claims to be able to find the cheapest tickets or ticket combinations: https://www.ticketclever.com/
People often don’t realise just how much more CO2 is involved in air travel – being otherwise green but flying with any regularity is like being a vegetarian because it’s”healthier” but still smoking… its just a displacement activity /form of denial. One trip to New York more than doubles the average person’s annual carbon footprint, so it would probably triple mine.
The big change over my lifetime is not that people fly on holiday – they have done that since I was a kid. The big change is that people now routinely fly away for the weekend, something that never happened until relatively recently. They even commute by plane; I used to have dealings with someone (job role; managing climate change impacts on his company) who did a weekly commute to his home in Barcellona every weekend just because it was “such a cool place to live”. He was English, his French wife did the same run to Paris every Monday. Neither had any connection to Barcellona before the chose to live there because cheap flights meant they could.
Flying is far too cheap, relatively speaking, mainly because it doesn’t pay fuel taxes like all other forms of transport have to.
I’m not willing to give up flying, not least because I like visiting warmer places with guaranteed sunshine for my hols now and again. But if you want to sleep at night you have to walk the talk. So a long time ago I vowed not to fly more than one trip a year, and my average is actually just less than that, with only 2 long haul trips in well over a decade. (I exclude a year spent working on an offshore island where local planes are effectively the buses).
Most of my friends are pretty environmentally aware, overall, certainly more than the average. But while they recycle, and cycle, and do all the other easy stuff they have a blind spot when it comes to flying even though not flying so much is probably the single biggest change they could make.
Meantime I’ve enjoyed many fab holidays in the UK and France without flying. As the pound plummets perhaps more people will have to holiday at home whether they like it or not. I fear that cost, and only cost, will make most people think twice about flying however green they are otherwise.
On the subject of holidays, I would also add that I’ve had a blast travelling in Europe on trains. So far I haven’t had that many opportunities to do it, but travelling to Venice by train was great fun. So much so that I’m now looking into Interrailing next time I want to go on any travels: http://www.interrail.eu/interrail-passes?gclid=CPfKiIXy8dECFUy37QodWUIB_w
Interesting, and odd, Mark, that your mindset seems to view ‘public transport’ as including trains, but not planes.
Mark, you miss out another important factor: I would always choose trains and ferries where possible because I am really terrified of flying! So if I take a flight there is the anxiety and stress cost to consider as well as all the other costs.
As an Englishman living in Dublin, Mark, I nip to and fro across the Irish Sea on a regular basis and certainly trains from Gatwick to Kent are much dearer than the flight, which is obviously ludicrous. I do sometimes feel guilty about my carbon footprint but the sight of that ferry port and the ferries sends shivers down my spine! I don’t have the time to travel by ferry but I have to say I wouldn’t if I could having done on a few occasions. For me it is the most depressing possible way to travel but I’m glad you enjoyed it. I wish I had your sanguine nature regarding ferries but give me a nice Aer Lingus flight every time. I like to think I offset my carbon footprint by not having a car but maybe I’m deluding myself. Anyway, flying is the closest I will get to being a bird!
My wife and I travel to Germany, where her family lives, a couple of times a year. We usually take the ferry from Newcastle to Amsterdam and this is usually (when it isn’t rough!) part of the fun of the trip. It’s an overnight trip but before it gets dark we usually spend most of the time outside on deck looking for wildlife. We usually see quite a few birds plus the occasional tantalizing glimpses of cetaceans. There is an impressive Lesser Black-backed and Herring Gull colony on the approach into Ijmuiden port and the ferry provides an excellent platform from which to view it!
To those nice people who’ve “disliked” my honest post can I just ask, is it because you love ferries, which is great or because you are judging my choice of taking the short hop of travelling between London and Dublin by plane? If it’s the latter then I would like to add in my own defence, that I never take holidays outside Britain and Ireland, don’t drive and have been vegan for the last 10 years. My carbon footprint could be better but it could be much worse I think.
Peter, I was one of your dislikes. It’s great that you take no holidays outside the British Isles, and your veganism probably means your food has a pretty low carbon footprint too. But your rebuttal illustrates my point all too well;if you had a car and ate burgers but didn’t fly your carbon footprint would be halved or quartered or more, depending on how often you fly to London.
Flying is so disproportionately CO2 expensive that any other lifestyle choices you make to live a greener lifestyle are almost irrelevant. Like my friends, if you don’t recolonise this then your you’re deluding yourself.
Interesting study years ago about smokers. They consistently underestimate the dangers of smoking – no surprise there. But they also consistently overestimate all other risks, from lightning to car accidents. I think many otherwise “green” fliers have fallen into the same trap. Your second post suggests you have too.
Of course in the real world we all have to make compromises, for family or work or because we really want to go to Corsica and see some sun. But let’s not delude ourselves; they are compromises, in the negative sense of that word.
Thanks for your responses Jbc. Actually, I think the data shows that livestock production produces more greenhouse gas emissions than aircraft overall so let’s adopt a healthier and more ethical diet firstly perhaps but I’m certainly not defending carbon emissions from transport sources but that aside and my personal preferences for travel notwithstanding, it’s pretty difficult to get to Kent and back from Dublin by ferry and train in a weekend to see my family, by ferrry. Unfortunately, I have a normal job and don’t have the luxury of time and I do what I can to reduce my carbon footprint. Very easy to hit the dislike button without knowing the full circumstances of someone’s life. I may have fallen foul of the delusions “green fliers” whatever that means, but I fear you may have fallen into the knee jerk response of the internet age although I note that added the bit about compromises. If you read my post again I think it was me that suggested I was being delusional. In retrospect and especially in the light of the “those without sin” in the environmental movement I think I was being overly harsh on myself but thanks for “revealing” yourself!.
Cheers Peter! Wasn’t intended to be personal – we live lives that are full of compromises because that’s how society is structured nowadays and short of being an off-grid hermit none of us are entirely free agents. I don’t think many of us are yet ready to embrace what living sustainably in an unsustainable world really entails. I’m not, for sure.
ps Livestock probably do produce more greenhouse gases overall than aviation (not doubting, just haven’t checked, we need less of both certainly). But that’s not a relevant comparison to one person’s impacts from meat and flying. Your (or my) flight produces way more CO2 than an annual supply of burgers for one person would. That’s the relevant comparison.
At least we’re both thinking about it…
My first ever flight was to Dublin, from Speke. It was nice, apart from the boorish behaviour of The Dubliners, who were travelling home eponymously.
My second ever flight was to Speke from Dublin. It was a Friday evening in September and apart from a couple of civilians like myself the passengers were all priests and nuns in uniform. As we took off the priest on my left crossed himself, as did the nun on my right. I could soon see the Isle of Man out of the port side windows. But only half of it as there was a black wall across the rest. As we flew into this thunderstorm the lighting flashed and the clerics crossed and we bounced around alarmingly. My priest closed the window blind and his eyes and my nun gripped my wrist and stared straight ahead. I didn’t like to say anything. As we descended into Speke the air became less turbulent and we went around in the dark in our flying coffin for three circuits before we landed.
On reaching the bottom of the steps from the aircraft I recall a palpable feeling of having Cheated Death, which I have enjoyed after every flight since. The rush of endorphins invariably makes me drive home like a lunatic to take advantage of the Invincibility Cloak before it wears off.
Filbert – there was a nun on the ferry. She looked like she might be able to walk on water.
They are always on the run