If you read my tale of riding my bicycle to the airport you may have made note of the apparent absurdity of doing so only to get on an airplane, which is not at all a low-carbon-emitting kind of thing to do.
But there was method to my madness.
Two or three times a year I travel from my home in Charlottetown to Dublin, New Hampshire to spend a week working with colleagues at Yankee Publishing. I’ve used a variety of ways of making this trip over the years, but most often I fly from Charlottetown to Halifax or Montreal, and then from there to Boston, rent a car, and drive the 90 minutes northwest to southern New Hampshire.
Earlier this summer, when I was making plans to again take this trip this September, I was talking to a friend about Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May; she, whenever possible, takes the train rather than flying (not an easy thing to do when running a national political operation).
That got me thinking that maybe I should take the train this time. There are no rail connections from Atlantic Canada into the northeastern U.S., but there is an overnight train from Moncton to Montreal, and a connecting bus from Charlottetown to Moncton.
When I discovered that I could rent a battery-electric vehicle in Montreal and drive from there to New Hampshire, and spend less doing so than the cost of renting a gasoline-powered car in Boston for the same period, I was sold.
I booked a bus-train journey from Charlottetown to Montreal, and reserved a Chevy Bolt from Montreal for the week.
The cost for the return fare, Maritime Bus from Charlottetown to Moncton and VIA Rail from Moncton to Montreal, was $1,148 and the journey would start on Friday at 1:00 p.m. and I’d arrive Montreal on Saturday at 10:00 a.m., returning the following Sunday, leaving Montreal at 7:00 p.m. and arriving Charlottetown on Monday 5:05 p.m., for a total travel time of 43 hours.
I decided to check my work.
I was going to be using this trip as an example of how long-distance travel without flying is possible and I wanted to make sure that the carbon emissions numbers added up. So I emailed the VIA Rail press office a query:
I’m a blogger who’s booked a bus-train combination from Charlottetown to Montreal in September, in part to be able to write about the difference in carbon footprint from taking the train vs. flying.
You have a helpful carbon calculator on your website, but it doesn’t include The Ocean, and so I’m wondering if you can fill in this gap for me directly: I have booked the Maritime Bus from Charlottetown to Moncton return, and room-for-1 on The Ocean return.
A week later VIA Rail emailed me the answer:
The total greenhouse gas emissions for a one-way trip on the Ocean between Moncton to Montreal is: 1,053.71 Kg of CO2e.
That seemed like an awful lot of carbon emitting for what I was holding out hope for as low-carbon travel: 2 tonnes of CO2e is an eighth of what our house emits in an entire year according to our EnerGuide assessment.
I compared the figure to the purported carbon emissions from flying the same Moncton to Montreal route, and they ranged from 90 kg to 130 kg for the one-way trip. About ten times lower than taking the train.
Surely VIA Rail’s numbers must be off, I reasoned. Or maybe it was the fact that I’d booked a bedroom rather than a coach seat. So I checked, with a follow-up to VIA:
As a supplementary, then, can you tell me what the CO2e figure would be if, rather than traveling in a bedroom I was to travel in a regular economy seat?
VIA’s reply was:
Whether you are travelling in a bedroom or in a regular economy seat, the greenhouse gas emissions are the same.
Having reached the edge of my ability to parse this, I looked for help from energy and transportation experts, an uncommon number of whom appeared to simply assume that VIA’s numbers couldn’t possibly be true, and suggest that I take the train regardless.
The most valuable advice I received came from Ryan M. Katz-Rosene from the University of Ottawa, who I found via a CBC story about the carbon emissions from air travel.
Ryan wasn’t surprised by VIA’s number, crediting the high carbon emissions to a combination of a long, meandering route, low occupancy (due, in part, to the low passenger-to-car ratio in sleeping cars), and the use of inefficient diesel locomotives. He did question that VIA uses the same emissions-per-passenger figure for both coach and sleeper seats; I wondered about this as well.
Ultimately he was forced to conclude:
When all is said and done, it does appear to be the case that in this particular instance flying is less carbon intensive than taking the train.
He added an important caveat, however:
VIA has tremendous potential for improvement. So, in a way, you could still justify taking the train in principle on the premise that you want to financially support a Crown corporation which can really use those funds to dramatically improve its service (and thus increase occupancies, and reduce emissions)… but my take is that, given the current situation, best response (if you absolutely must take one of those two options) is to fly and then write a letter to your MP pointing out how unacceptable the whole situation is!
Much of the political conversation about passenger rail in Canada concerns high speed rail. For long distance routes like Halifax to Montreal speed is a secondary concern, as the distance means that it’s always going to be a long run; this means that we can turn ourselves to high efficiency rail, both the efficiency of the rolling stock and of the logistics of actually taking the train.
The notion that a Prince Edward Islander might choose to take the train to Montreal, for example, seems to occupy roughly 0% of VIA Rail’s marketing efforts. There is no long-term parking at the Sackville VIA Rail station (the closest one to PEI). Bus connections to and from the Moncton VIA station on Maritime Bus aren’t guaranteed: if the train is late and the bus leaves, you’re out of luck. It is by no means part of an integrated transportation network for Islanders. I imagine that’s part of the “tremendous potential for improvement” that Ryan references.
Ryan finished his email with one final comment:
Or you could take the bus.
And I seriously considered that: my emissions would be considerably lower (about 25 to 50 kg of CO2e), and the cost–about $200 return–would have been half the cost of flying and a fifth the cost of the train.
But ultimately I decided that sitting on a bus for 34 hours (15 hours there, 19 hours back) was a bridge too far for me.
And while that reflects a distressing lack of fortitude on my part, it also points out that for low-carbon travel to become as popular is it needs to be, it will help if it isn’t also perceived a dreadful experience.
Taking the train to Montreal, as I found in 2017, is thoroughly enjoyable; taking a long distance bus ride is, by almost any measure, an exhausting and uncomfortable way to travel, and few people would choose it if there’s any other reasonable alternative.
So I flew.
The air trip took 90 minutes. I cycled to Charlottetown Airport. I took hybrid buses and the Metro from Trudeau Airport to my brother’s house, and then, later in the day, we used a Toyota Prius car-share to travel to the Discount Car rental depot to pick up my Chevy Bolt for the drive to New Hampshire.
My next step is to do what Ryan suggested: write my MP–and, indeed, all the federal candidates in Charlottetown–asking them their plans for high efficiency long-distance rail travel from Prince Edward Island.
I woke up at 3:45 a.m. on Saturday morning. I showered, got dressed, made myself a coffee and some granola with yogurt.
After my quick breakfast, I took my bicycle trailer out of the front room and set it on the sidewalk, and filled its bucket with my suitcase and backpack. I wheeled my bicycle out of the front hall and hooked it up to the trailer, using the light on my phone to help me guide the cotter pin through the hole that holds it in place.
And then I rode my bicycle to the airport.
I’d only hatched the plan the night before.
My habit for more than 20 years when leaving on an early morning flight from Charlottetown has been to call Coop Taxi and order up a cab for an hour before departure; on Friday night I was about to do the same thing when it occurred to me that, given that I’m attempting to make this trip to New Hampshire that I’m now in the midst of, as low-carbon-emitting as possible, I should consider the possibility of taking my bicycle instead of a taxi.
This was an inane idea.
My flight was for 6:25 a.m.
The sun wasn’t going to rise until 6:50 a.m., by which time I’d be in the air for 25 minutes already.
The weather forecast called for a temperature of 7ºC.
Charlottetown Airport is 5 km from my house and I’d only ever taken an electric-assist bicycle there before; while friends of mine regularly head out for 100 km jaunts on a Sunday afternoon, 5 km is a long distance ride for me.
Clearly this wasn’t going to work. I gave up on the idea.
Then fate intervened: I turned my attention to writing an email to my friend Thelma, and I added, at the end:
I’m off to New Hampshire in the morning via the early flight to Montreal. I’m currently trying to decide whether my climate commitments extend to riding my bicycle to the airport at 5:00 a.m. in 7°C weather.
By writing this I unwittingly caused the idea to take on a new life. And to come up with real reasons that this wasn’t possible (“Well, Greta Thunberg, I couldn’t really ride my bicycle to the airport because my hands would get cold…”).
The die was cast.
Google Maps told me that it would take me 27 minutes to ride to the airport. It took me 44 minutes: I left at 4:45 a.m. and arrived at 5:28 a.m. The extra time was due a combination of the aforementioned darkness (the Confederation Trail is well-lit until you get to Mount Edward Road, then it’s shrouded in inky darkness), hurricane-induced trees across the trail between the bypass and the airport, a couple of water breaks, my pulling a trailer, and my relative lack of fitness (that said, this trip wouldn’t have been possible without the uptick in fitness from a summer of cycling almost every day).
The going was mostly flat or a gentle upslope, with the exception of the stretch of Sherwood Road from the trail up to the airport which defeated me and required that I hop off and push (I reverted to riding when I realized that although riding was hard, pushing bike and trailer was harder).
When I pulled into the employee parking like just before 5:30 a.m. my airplane was ready and waiting.
The only bicycle rack at the airport is by the employee entrance on the right side near the departure doors; I’d checked earlier to ensure that it was okay for me to park there and was assured that there would be no problem. So I unloaded my gear and locked my trailer to my bike:
Given that the employee break room is right next door, and that it’s an airport, I suspect this might be the most secure bicycle parking in Charlottetown.
Walking into the airport, the combination of the early hour and the strenuous opening exercises combined to place me in a rather pleasant stress-free haze that made the transit through security and the wait for boarding as anxiety-free as I’ve ever experienced.
I slept most of the flight to Montreal.
I’m away for a week, returning from Montreal next Sunday. My flight lands at 11:25 p.m., so my ride home will be equally inky. I just hope it’s not raining.
Remember my tale of How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass?
Well, I ordered it on September 3, it arrived 7 days later at The Bookmark, and I picked it up today.
Local independent bookstore FTW.
As you all know, I love that it’s possible to load a bicycle on the front of public transit buses in Charlottetown, and, since I first wrote about this in 2013, I’ve tried hard to spread the word to others.
More often than not the reaction I get, even from frequent cyclists, is “I can take my bicycle on the bus!?”
Fortunately, I now have an additional superpower, via my membership on the Mayor’s Task Force on Active Transportation, and I’m happy to report that one of my fellow members is spearheading an effort to organize an information session on bicycle-carrying-buses.
This event will happen in the parking lot of the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market on September 28, 2019 from 10:00 a.m (details are here on the City of Charlottetown website).
This is a collaborative effort of the Task Force, city officials, T3 Transit and the Market.
A couple of years ago, T3 Transit made this great how-to video that explains the process of getting your bicycle into the rack; my hope is that people will use the opportunity on September 28 to ride their bicycles to the market (or borrow one of the bikes that will be on-site) and give this a try in the parking lot: there’s nothing like getting a chance to go through the motions for the first time without the pressure of a bus full of people staring at you!
Spread the word!
Those of you who have been reading here for a long time may recall that, many years ago during simpler times, I developed a macOS app called PresenceRouter.
PresenceRouter allowed you to echo your geopresence information in Plazes to a variety of other sites (we didn’t call them “social media” back then, just “sites”); by the time of the final release in November 2008 it supported 21 sites in all.
Here’s what it look like to add a new site to the configuration:
In reviewing the apps on my Mac that are 32-bit ( > About This Mac > System Report > Applications), and thus won’t run when macOS Catalina is released later this fall, I noticed PresenceRouter in the list.
In other words, if you upgrade to Catalina, you won’t be able to run PresenceRouter.
Given that Plazes, upon which PresenceRouter depends, shut down 7 years ago itself, this shouldn’t prevent a practical impediment to anyone. But it is the end of an era, and the practical end of a project that taught me a lot about developing Mac apps, about authentication, and about the open web.
More serious for me at this point is that AccountEdge, the bookkeeping app that I rely on to run my business, is still 32-bit-only, and won’t be updated in time for the Catalina release. So I’ll be stuck in the Mojave until it gets updated.
Has there ever been as enthusiastic a guest on the Cool Tools podcast as Susie Bright?
To say nothing of the breadth of her tool recommendation choices: Gingher Craft Scissors, Palomino Blackwing 602 Pencils, the Original Magic Wand and the Heavy Duty Commercial Potato Ricer.
Truly an episode where the deadpan curiosity of co-hosts Kevin Kelly and Mark Frauenfelder provides an excellent canvas on which Bright can paint.
When Hurricane Juan struck Prince Edward Island in 2003, our neighbourhood, while not devastated, was certainly affected: huge trees came down, power was out for several days, and there was a lot of cleaning up to do. Including, the morning after, helping to run a provincial general election, and, the day after that, holding Oliver’s 3rd birthday party.
Hurricane Dorian passed over the Island on Saturday, and, if you are following the news at all, you will see that there were significant impacts: power (still) out to a large swath of the population, barns and boats destroyed, campgrounds flooded, huge trees down.
At 100 Prince Street, though, it was almost like nothing happened: we lost power for 2 hours on Saturday afternoon, which was enough time for a good nap. The power came back on in time to let me make supper, and has been back on ever since. There was a single small branch down in the back yard, and an uptick in the number of leaves down. But that was it.
We’ve had a lot on our plate this September, so I thank the fates for sparing us the additional challenges of storm recovery. And thoughts go out to Islanders, and others in Dorian’s wake, not so-spared.
I’d like to think that the members of the Bldg. Fresh Air Intake Unit had very smart uniforms and exceptional collegiality.
About This Blog
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way). You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, or receive a daily digests of posts by email.