The other week I had a business meeting in Manchester, and, to cut a long story short, there’s no good way to get Brighton to Manchester for a day trip unless you hire a helicopter. I didn’t hire a helicopter, although I did look into that option.
Of the sane options — drive, train, fly — the cost/time/environment equation for a trip was surprising to me.
By car the journey would have taken 5hr 30mins (one way), pushed out about 0.21 tonnes of CO2 and cost something like £180+ as I would have to had hired a car for this journey the way things panned out. I’m not willing to drive 11 hours in one day.
I don’t know what the CO2 would be like for the train trip (I suspect the lowest) but it was the most expensive at £250 — I had no idea it was possible to pay so much for a standard one-day return fare. That trip would have taken 4+ hours with two changes and a taxi. Not too bad.
The option I went for was to fly: including taxis and taxes and trains and waiting around at airports it worked out to £220 and a 3hr 50min door-to-door trip. And less CO2 than the car, at 0.06 tonnes. That’s the part I can’t understand. Maybe I’m not using the calculator correctly, or have I misunderstood the air-travel-will-destory-the-planet reports?