The easiest way to make Sustainability happen…
Normally at this time of year I’m ramping up preparations for local elections, but this year we have a ‘fallow’ election-free year and I’m relatively free to enjoy the Spring. The last fallow year was during Covid, so I’m determined to make the most of it and do what I’ve long fancied doing – travelling to Belgium to watch the ‘Opening Weekend’ of cycle races while drinking beer and eating frites. I love travelling by train and I love cycling. Train plus bike is an incredibly fun, flexible and low carbon way to get around… if you can get your bike on the train.
OK, so my plan is take my bike on Eurostar to Brussels then cycle out into Flanders to stay in a conveniently located B&B. Then I’ll spend the weekend watching races and/or testing out some classic cobbled climbs myself before riding back into Brussels to get the train home. But here’s the process of booking a bike on Eurostar:
1. Book your seat on one of the four services each day that takes bikes;
2. Download a excess luggage form and manually fill in all (and I mean all) the details of the above booking and e-mail it to Eurostar;
3. Wait up to seven days for Eurostar to work out if there is space on your booked services for a bike and book you in (the stage I’m currently at);
4. If the bike gets a green light, pay Eurostar £45 extra each way for the privilege of jumping through all those hoops.
5. Turn up 90 minutes early so someone can put your bike on a trolley to put it on the train.
And so I wait to see if the trip will happen, unwilling to book my train to London or my accommodation until I know the bike has got a place on Eurostar. At least I’m not going to Paris where I would have to dismantle my bike and put it in a box (what do you do with a bike-sized box at the far end when you’re on a bike?!).
British trains used to be almost as much of a pain in the backside to get a bike on – I used to go to the station and ask a staff member to jump through the hoops for me – but they have been transformed. If I now go on Trainline to book an LNER ticket to London, for example, I can click on a bike symbol to see how many bike spaces are available on each service and book one along with my seat, for free. You know, like it’s 2025.
You’ve probably guessed what the moral of the story is. If you want people to behave in a low carbon way, don’t put stupid hurdles in their way. Trainline and LNER show how seamless systems can be if they are designed correctly; Eurostar’s system is a disaster zone by comparison. The easiest quick wins in Sustainability is identifying those hurdles and move them out of the way – it often costs nothing and can save you money. And if you want to know what the hurdles are, ask people trying to do the right thing – they’ll soon put you right. At length.