I like travelling by bike, but i am not the biggest fan of doing roundtrips, i much prefer moving further and further away. So on longer trips i will end up way far from home, and since travelling by train across Europe, can be a real ordeal (especially with a bike), i sometimes take a plane back home. I guess busses would be an option too from some locations, i personally absolutely hate travelling by bus though. Weak excuse i know.
I am able to rationalize to myself that it is ok to take that flight, i spent now weeks doing low impact travel and can end it with a boom and still probably had less impact then with my regular life at home (i have not really done the calculation tbh). Of course, if it is reasonably easy to get home by train i will definitely prefer that, and i absolutely don’t always end up taking a plane.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you ever take a flight?
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- you have the advantage of decent public transit it EU, take advantage of it – in the US, most often we simply don’t have the time to take “slower” options (we can go across the country in a few hours by plane or three long days by train – EDIt: or a grueling week long challenge on bus)
- prioritize your options, rank them by something like “level of guilt” and “level of tiredness” (in addition to “cost”, “convenience”, “availability”, “bike facilities”) – ex. trains get preference, planes are left for when you’re too exhausted to even think of anything else
- plan circular routes / loops / circuits rather than a there-and-back approach – you’re now facing “the last leg” or “closing the loop” rather than just figuring out how you’re getting home from some singular destination
I’m planning to fly transcontinental once every 8 years for the rest of my life, but I’m being pretty strict with myself for anything shorter than that and going train or bus. For me it’s not exactly about the personal impact as much as doing it to make it easier for others in the future to do better. So every time I “suffer” a little because I take an extra day to travel by train/bus, I just think about how my doing it makes it more likely that train service with bikes will get easier for the next person to do the same thing. (Also I live in the US so most routes are much much harder than pretty much anywhere in Europe from what I hear.)
The flight will happen with or without you… they won’t be gassing the plane up just to take you to and from, so I don’t see why hitching a ride on something that’s already going that way would be terrible
