Latest Comments

Katrin How on earth did they do it?
27. März 2024
Ah, that's good to know! I might have a look around just out of curiosity. I've since learned that w...
Heather Athebyne How on earth did they do it?
25. März 2024
...though not entirely easy. I've been able to get my hands on a few strands over the years for Geor...
Katrin Hieroglyphs.
23. Februar 2024
Yes, that would sort of fit that aspect - but you can also go from bits of woods to sticks if you ar...
Bruce Hieroglyphs.
23. Februar 2024
I think the closest English equivalent would be 'Down the rabbit hole'. It has one entrance (No, not...
Harma Spring is Coming.
20. Februar 2024
I'm definitely jealous! Mine disapeared except for one pathetic little flower. But the first daffodi...

Travels in 2019.

At the start of last year, I realised it would be a really interesting thing to keep track of what means of transport I'd use how much over the course of a year. So we hung up a sheet of paper on which we'd jot down train rides, public transport rides, and, in my case, the two flights I've taken. Bike kilometres were tracked via the odometers, and the car, of course, has its own odometer, with the start-of-year number duly noted anyways due to tax reasons.

So here's the full rundown of my travelled distances for 2019.

Winner, by far, is the long-distance train, with a sound 7845 km done. Longest individual train rides were the one to London for the MEDATS study day (about 1000 km one way) and my train ride to Leiden, where I had to take a detour to catch the sleeper train in Passau - this, together, amounted to about 1126 km to get there. Back was only 672 km, without the detour.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4UK2Suojta/

Public transport trains in our vicinity add another 630 km to the train bill - so altogether with these, my train distance is 8475 km. (I calculated the train kilometres through brouter.de, which is a routing/distance calculator website based on the Open StreetMap, using the train option. I did not make sure that this was the exact route that I did take with the trains apart from the one very interesting one to Leiden, so numbers may have been a bit different in reality - it should work out about correctly overall, though.)

Second in line is the car - with 6621 km travelled. This is both the distances done for job reasons (3803 km) and those for private reasons (2818 km). When travelling for job purposes, I'm usually alone in the car, but it is full of stuff; when travelling for personal reasons, we're usually at least two people in the car, and we do try to fill up the car if possible.

Third in the list is the bicycle - though this is my main daily means of transport (together with just walking for the very short distances). It's only shorter distances, though, usually between 3 and 10 km one way, so it does not sum up as quickly as the things done by train or car. (If it's a longer distance, we often do a combination of public transport and bicycle, which is at least as fast as the car in many cases, and usually cheaper.) I rode my recumbent for 422 km last year, and did 2408 km on the tandem together with the Most Patient Husband of Them All - so 2830 km. (Probably a few more, since I sometimes forget the odometer, or it doesn't register things at first because the spoke magnet has been turned out of position.)

2341 km were done by plane - that was my WorldCon trip to Dublin and back. (Probably a bit more, since that is the direct distance between start and end points, but I could not find any way to calculate the actual flight path distances. It will have to do.) Travelling there by other means would have added about 5 to 6 days to that venture, and that was not possible time-wise for me, so I did opt for the plane.

Here's the list again, in short:

8475 km - trains (long-distance and public transport trains)
6621 km - car (both work-related and private)
2830 km - bicycle
2341 km - plane

So I did 1.7 times the distance using train and bike than I did with the car, and more kilometres per bike than with the plane. There's still some room for improvement, obviously - but I'm quite happy with the train quota for work stuff that I managed this year, considering that I do usually have to haul quite a bit of things when travelling for work.

I can say that apart from being really interesting, jotting down the kilometres done via public transport actually made me try a little harder to go by train if possible. The part where I think would be the most wiggle room for some improvement are the distances done in the car for private reasons; maybe that can be a little less in 2020. There's currently no flight planned for the coming year, too, but a long and adventurous train ride, so I'm already looking forward to find out how the numbers will stand at the end of this year.

So - would you like to join me in the project? I'd be curious to hear about your numbers in 12 months!
0
Low-CO2 travelling...
The System Setup Woes.
 

Comments

No comments made yet. Be the first to submit a comment
Already Registered? Login Here
Donnerstag, 28. März 2024

Related Posts

Kontakt