Novacon Carbon Footprint

[major_clanger]

Getting two of us from Edinburgh to Walsall for Novacon:

By air: circa £120 (air fares and taxis), 3 hrs.

By car: circa £120 (petrol and running costs), 6 hrs.

By rail: circa £200, 6 hrs.

And that is booking ten weeks in advance.

According to the Guardian's carbon-offset website, flying would generate 240 kg of carbon dioxide, which would cost £1.77 to offset. Driving would generate 210 kg, costing £1.58 to offset. No data for trains.

EDIT: Or we could give the GoH a lift and split the costs!

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I noticed this when Z and I wanted to go up to Lancaster. I wanted to go on the train. I love trains, apart from the environmental thing I actively prefer trains to any other form of transport. I don't know what they think they're gaining by pricing themselves out of the market.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

To be fair there are three cheaper types of ticket we could get for that journey, starting from £20-30 each way. Unfortunately they have already sold out.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Those tickets seem to exist in almost homeopathically small quantities. A cynic might propose that they only exist at all in order to make the train companies look better - "Hey, you can get from here to here for this little!"

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

I seem to be able to get the nice cheap tickets for going up to Glasgow and places without much of a problem, this may say more about how many people use the sleeper than the number of tickets though. :-)

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

I take trains everywhere. I have never managed to get one of the cheaper advance fares, even when I haunt the website 30, 14 and 7 days in advance of my journey, and even though there are a number of trains I am prepared to take.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

It's not that the rail companies are pricing themselves out of the market - it's that successive governments have, by reducing subsidies, forced rail to price itself out of the market, whilst pouring all sorts of hidden subsidies into road. It's no good hoping that market forces will sort the railways until those market forces get applied equally across the transport sphere.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

What's the accounting on that? I'm interested in these hidden subsidies.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

There's a report here about the relative degree of road and rail subsidies back in the mid-90s. I doubt the picture has got any better in favour of rail since.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

As far as I am aware, the railways are now more heavily subsidised (in real terms) than ever before. It's just that now the money goes straight into shareholders' pockets and is not spent on trains.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

That uses some very, very dubious accounting. It lists anything that could vaguely be considered an externalised cost, and it makes no attempt to count externalised benefit! It also doesn't really distinguish the public/private nature sources of the "subsidy" very well.

For example, it lists police and court costs of £3bn, based on an unsourced estimate that 25% of police time is spent on such matters, but doesn't deduct from that any estimate of fines against motorists. It's disingenous to attribute extra cost to motoring from the existance of criminals who steal cars / from cars, and one could argue that much of the cost is poor productivity of the police.

Table 10 similarly relies on an unsourced estimate of the proportion of insurance costs that go on administration, and inflates the estimated cost of accidents using the rail "willingness to pay" numbers rather than the road ones (OK, there is a problem with unrealistically high expectations of rail safety).

The real bulk of the alleged subsidy comes from estimates of the land value used by parking (£6bn, much of which is on private land anyway) and asset value of the road network (over £30bn!). I don't think "not charging for asset value" is what most people think of as a subsidy, and it doesn't show up in the public accounts as such. If we were to follow that route, all sorts of things like the NHS and the MOD would look very much more expensive. Arguably it shouldn't be levied against railtrack, and the fact that it is is an artefact of the stupid ownership structure of the railways.

No estimate is made of the inconvenience costs of travelling by rail (including delay, crime, lost possessions, time spent waiting, transfers, noise, etc)

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I'd give the GoH a lift. A full car isn't going to be a lot worse than a train, I'd have thought.

I've usually done pretty well on picking up cheap rail tickets, but I haven't looked into Novacon yet. I really ought to get around to it...

I rarely drive anywhere now, though that's as much a general dislike of driving as it is carbon saving.

According to http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/ I'm using 1.82 planets. I'm well ahead of the UK average of 3 planets, but I still have some way to go.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

A full car is occasionally more CO2 efficient than the rail alternative, but it depends on the precise train you take, its power source and, crucially, how full it is. Mind you, since it's going anyway I guess you should assume it's 100% full for this decision-making purpose, rather than for public policy decision making, where you have to factor in average usage.

Is that 3 hours for the flight a realistic door-to-door figure including full check-ins?

[frostfox.livejournal.com]

I usually manage between £12 and £40 each way to London.
thetrainline.com is my favoured site.

FF who might not need the car this year for Novacon as I don't think I'm taking stock.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

Ooh, and I've just thought, have you tried splitting the journey into random sections? Frequently works wonders for long journeys, the problem is that you don't know which split will do the job and have to try all of them - there's probably some kind of online group with tips though.

[jamesb.livejournal.com]

stolen from an article I read last month:

'The best-performing electric trains are operated by GNER (west coast J) between London and Edinburgh and emit only 40g of CO2 per passenger-kilometre (g/pkm) compared with 112g/pkm for Voyagers. (diesel usually X-country J)'

I expect you will travel on the east coast mainline with GNER is best cause the 225 engine uses AC power and the coaches are lighter, Mark 4, than current safety/build demands.

The times did have a train comparison guide, to compare all trains, like a class 158 'sprinter' can be really pretty crap.

Now if you are on the ECML Virgin do have a C02 calculation table here
http://www.virgintrains.co.uk/gogreener/defaulthtml.aspx

I think the pendolino is not as good as the 225, but I am then nit sure on the figures.

It says Edinburgh to Birmingham is either 35 0r 41 KGC02 per journey, dependednt on route.

Now pendos use dynamic braking which crates regenerative electricity and they are about 17% more efficient or power saving than other electric trains let alone compared to a diesel, so that may account for the difference.

Finally. I am really surprised at the cost of that ticket, I know I should not be, BUT you will see on the virgin list HOW CHEAP they do sell tickets.
Timing and Date is all important, BUT its a good 8 weeks away.

Look at routings, and try various rail companies as well as the nationalrail website.

I know that most tickets become available 3 months before hand, and this is the time to hit, if you are looking for value.

I adore trains, and wish they were CHEAPER. J

[jamesb.livejournal.com]

OK, sorry I meant GNER (east coast J) sorry.

what route are you travelling out of interest anyhow

J

[feorag.livejournal.com]

EDIT: Or we could give the GoH a lift and split the costs!

GoH is going down in the Swedish Tank with nojay and myself. There is, alas, only one spare seat, but we are trying to persuade another local fannish type that it's about time he did a Novacon again.

And then there's the additional terror of being driven by me on bits that aren't motorway.

[ang-grrr.livejournal.com]

Watch those cheap tickets... when travelling to London we check weekly from about 3 months before. Sometimes they only release the cheap singles 6 weeks beforehand. It's a waiting game.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

What a pain. The time and bother spent planning public transport journeys is a cost in itself, and is why many people would rather drive.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

But planning road journeys is also a meaningful cost - especially once you've checked the traffic/roadwork reports and in extreme cases webcams. I had to do serious thought to plan a decent time of day to drive down to Kent last weekend, then more serious planning to decide which of the various diversions I should use to take us round the flooded A20 (watermain not rain) and then we ended up stuck in roadworks on the M20 for an hour anyway, because I didn't realise that the normally manageable 1 lane closure becomes a 2 lane closure in the evenings.

I would normally spend at least as much time planning a long drive as I would buying a train ticket.