Category: Environmental | Experiences | Ideas | Opinion | Travel
A train in Europe
Posted by Rupert on December 19, 2008
It’s Christmas time and I want to visit my family. They live in Scotland, me in Portugal. Having learned about the major impacts of air travel to greenhouse gas emissions and the subsequent increase in global warming, I realised that we should do our best not to fly, but to go by land. There are four of us: two adults, two kids. I read somewhere that going by bus produces the lowest carbon emissions per passenger mile, but I just don’t think the kids (nor I) could handle two days in one seat. But train is good, we like trains: you can walk around, have tea in the bar, play games on the tables, read, maybe do some work. Meet people and so on.
We live minutes from the Spanish border, so I call the Spanish train company RENFE to ask about tickets across the continent. The answer comes back from an apologetic operator: 800 euros to London, per person ! I asked if she meant “for all of us”, but alas no, per person. Slightly cheaper for kids but hardly.
OK, there has to be a better, rather cheaper way. I check out the impressive “seat61″ site that provides advice for going by train to just about anywhere – Trans-Siberian Express or how to cross the Andes… They had some good information about the European Interrail ticket: One ticket, anywhere in Europe for a limited time. So we look at 10 days travel over a 22 day period. It came in at 260 euros each adult, and slightly less for kids, not including the channel crossing from France to UK. So we’re way over the thousand Euro mark, plus we would have to spend hours booking and organising connections between Spain and France, a real headache. Nowhere could I find a European site that would organise it for us, and act as a liasion point between the various national railways.
We check the flights: Ryan air – Porto to London is around 70 euros each, inc. baggage. At least half the price.  We are forced by economic reasons to fly. How can this make sense? If Europe is serious about cutting emissions by 20% by 2020, surely it should make it much easier to go by train, and far more pleasant by coach.
Compared with the billions pumped in to prop up the banks, a fraction of this would surely be better spent creating two immediate upgrades to regional transport: first, upgrade coaches to be larger, wider, swifter; include family tables where you can play cards and share a meal, build in video screens for goggling at the box or watching a film, have on board wireless services. Make special lanes on motorways for coaches so they aren’t held up in traffic. This is no magic bullet, it’s just a few minor alternations.
In his book on ten simple thing Governments can do to avoid climate change, Heat, George Monbiot references a study into the feasibility of this system. In other words, it’s already been analysed in depth, and is sitting on a shelf somewhere. Monbiot advocates that these inter-city coaches would avoid the city centres and stick to the transport super-highways that have been built throughout Europe (bus stops would be at the junctions).
The infrastructure is already there: all we have to do is adapt the vehicles a bit and we could be gliding accross borders at a fraction of the carbon cost. Critical here is that it becomes a European wide network. that there is agreement accross the 27 odd countries that signed up to the latest environment targets in Brussels. How hard can that be? And if it took a few thousand airplanes out of the sky, how many million tonnes of carbon dioxide would it save?
Second – the trains. Set up a European train service. An internet based clearing house in all 27 or so languages that people can call up and actually talk to a human being to find out how he or she can get from Bucharest to Athens, or Barcelona to Glasgow, by train, at low cost – with all the connections sorted. An email is sent back to the customer, with a reference number and a list of the various changes they would need to make. Duh, can it be so hard. Why is that Ryanair and Easyjet get to have the monopoly on super easy internet based travel bookings? Take a leaf from their book, while we put them out of business for good.
Local and regional air travel has to go the way of the dodo if we have any chance of reducing our emissions to a level that will not cause runaway climate change and the end of this interglacial cool equilibrium our species has enjoyed that last ten thousand years or so.
By Magnus Wolfe Murray
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