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)