Is The Ticket Price The Only Cost?

Photo by thejonoakley

I'm sure you'll have seen the news yesterday about the £1,000 train fare and how it means that the world has gone to the dogs and society as we know it has broken down.

I checked on my ticket machine this morning and it's right enough: A First Class Anytime Return from Newquay to Kyle of Lochalsh is £1,002.00.

Of course, it's not a story when you start thinking about it in a normal, non-knee-jerk-tabloid way.

Nobody in their right mind would wake up one morning and suddenly decide to travel the length of Britain, paying on board the train for First Class, and knowing that the journey will take 20 hours.

The journey can't even be done in a day, the only way it's possible to do without a significant break is to catch the overnight sleeper from Crewe to Inverness.

So no, that's the kind of journey that is planned months in advance. And when you are planning it, you realise that on balance a 10 hour car trip will probably be better your pocket than a 2-day 20-hour 5-train extravaganza.

But what about the environment? Lets do the maths. The distances travelled are not the same, since the train journey is not as direct as the car journey.

BY RAIL

In the book How to Live a Low-carbon Life, Chris Goodall uses the figure of 49g of CO2 per passenger km for the average rail travel in the UK. However, he goes on to say that First Class travel, which our £1,000 is for, actually increases that by 50%. So we'll use 73.5g per passenger km as our emissions for the train journey.

Using Google Earth and allowing for the curvature of the railway tracks etc, the train journey is approximately 1,400km.

That means one passenger will generate 102.9kg of CO2 for their First Class journey, one way.

BY CAR

The average car in the UK emits 180g of CO2 per kilometre, significantly more than the train. Again using Google Earth, the road journey is approximately 1,200km.

That means one passenger in a car will generate 216kg of CO2 for the one way journey, more than double the train emissions.

So the train wins out in terms of pollution, but only if there's just one person in the car. In terms of cost, then obviously the car wins, even if you hired one. In fact, you could probably buy an old banger that you scrapped at the destination and it would still cost less!

Still, I wouldn't say no to the commission on that ticket!