Travel

Walk/Bike/Car
I used to use the car by default for pretty much all journeys long or short, even though I liked to keep fit by playing sport and running.  We now have a policy of walking or cycling if the journey is less than 5 miles to reduce the car pollution and it also saves money with increasing fuel prices.   You will be surprised how little it really rains even though we all complain about it! The Norwegians have a saving - 'there is no such this as bad weather, just wrong clothes'!  So, walk and cycle more, feel fitter, save money and the environment.  Everyone's a winner! So far durng the summer we have saved 25-30% on our spend on diesel!!  Can we keep it up during the winter?!


Waitrose Bike Hods
Waitrose have starting offering bike 'hods' for loan to take your shopping home on your bike.  This is a free service but you do need a John Lewis credit card.   It has been trialled at a few stores and is now being rolled to more and more across the country. Ask the manager of your local store if they do not offer it.

Bike Trailers
The Waitrose bike hods got us thinking about how we could use are bikes more and more.  We tend to not to use the car for local journeys and use our bikes or walk instead.  Although you are obviously very limited in what you can carry whilst on a bike.  We looked in to bike trailers and were very impressed with what is out there. We now have a 'Doggy Ride' to take our dog that is getting a bit too old for running alongside the bikes out and about and to also use it to carry things like the shopping enabling us to use the car even less!  www.bikesandtrailers.com have a good range and John provides a very helpful and friendly service.

Public Transport
We have started to use public transport more instead of driving, especially for long distances. I thought it would be a real hassle but it isn't really.  As long as you book quite a way in advance it the cost is comparable or cheaper than petrol . I find it so much more relaxing traveling by train, I feel I am on a journey, enjoying the scenery as well as not polluting the environment!  www.thetrainline.com is a great site for planning/booking journeys.  Also for around London, Transport for London have a good journey planner at www.journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk

Carbon Neutral Journeys
The Carbon Neutral Company have a great website where you can calculate the carbon impact of running a car or a particular flight and it will provide the opportunity to donate the equivalent amount into a project that will offset the carbon impact such as planting trees.  We hired a car for a day and it calculated the carbon impact cost would be £1 (which seemed too cheap?!) and then gave us the facility to donate that to a tree planting project. 

70mph
A friend of  mine  said that he got 500 miles out of a tank of diesel when driving on the motorway at 70mph compared to 400 miles at 80mph.   So that is about 25% cost saving, less damage to the environment for an increase in journey time of about 12%.  I tried this and it actually felt more relaxing to drive at this speed (although we were not in a hurry).  I naturally want to rush everywhere and I find keeping to 70mph is very difficult but it does reap benefits for my wallet, the environment and my stress levels.  We now have a car that tells us the average mpg of the journey - this really helps me think about how I am driving around town as well as on the motorway.