I think there’s a marked difference in how people think about flying somewhere between Europe and North America, Australia, where much of EC staff is located. I try not to fly when at all possible and most of the time that works. From Northern and Central Europe you can get to much of Europe by train and bus pretty comfortably. That’s just not the case for many of the other regions.
That being said, I do find it a little alienating when people fly halfway across the world multiple times a year for bike races or bike holidays. The entry fee for, say, the Cape Epic is something like 4,500€ per person, plus flights and additional accommodation and stuff. That’s neither financially nor logistically possible for me, at all. But I guess cycling is a rich people’s sport. Some people live in that kind of reality and they get to talk about it on EC, just in the same way that people get to ride fancy 15,000€ bikes that I’ll never ride.
I have never flown anywhere with my bike, but that’s because I don’t know how to pack it and am completely incapable when it comes to bike maintenance, assembly, and disassembly.
An interesting question! I admire your environmental consideration. Air travel is one of the single biggest individual choices you can make, in terms of global warming impact.
Having said that, it does depend on where you live and what other options you may have. Living in the Pacific North West of the USA there really is no other way to get to anywhere else in a reasonable amount of time or cost. We don’t have trains, never mind high speed ones and the distances to even relatively nearby places are long. We do have an electric car for Vancouver or Portland, but beyond that air travel is really the best/only option.
I also think that travel, especially to other countries and cultures is really important to get outside of your bubble and realize the world is not really the one you see in the ‘news’ or online.
Can’t believe y’all debating geographical flatness… Greetings from Singapore, where the tallest “mount” (not even a mountain) runs 94m, and we get stoked on climbs not more than a few hundred metres long, gradients (more like momentary spikes) <20%.
So yeah, I do travel overseas for rides, if I’m not heading north into Malaysia, or south into Indonesia. For an island measuring 47km x 27km, there’s really not much choice really, especially when rides become really repetitive.
What’s worse? Flying journalists to a single location, or flying/couriering multiple bikes seperately too and then quite likely back from the same journalists home locations?
Couriering the bikes to the journalists is likely less harmful, but add in the back and it’s quite probably worse, unless they organise press bikes in each market that are then sold on in those same markets.
If we want reviews, the people need to be in the same location as the bikes at some point.
Interail tickets mean that european train travel can be cheaper than flying. An interail ticket includes travel from your nearest UK rail station to Eurostar, and gives a big discount on Eurostar (so long as you don’t book other services through the interail site, there are very few other additional charges).
Yes it does require a bit more planning, but it’s very possible for a reasonable price.
Remember you have to get to/from the airport too when flying, and maybe pay for long stay parking, which is often forgotten/ignored when people compare prices. Same with time getting too/from/through airports.
That said, UK to Spain would probably take a couple of days by train, and I totally get that travelling in the UK, on Eurostar or on many high speed services in Europe with a bike can be problemtatic.
I think EC has made some decent decisions here. They’ve got journalists distributed across a decent part of the world, and they seem to be strategically picky about the places they send folks. @Ronan_Mc_Laughlin but some related comments on an episode of Geek Warning a month or six ago. He talked briefly about not going to product launches or not wanting to go to products launches if the manufactures were withholding important details about the product (Note: my confidence level on the exact details is about 0.3 𝜎 ). To me that suggests they’re making travel decisions with due consideration. Also, maybe being supported by subscriptions helps since they don’t have unlimited funds or big sponsors paying them to travel.
EC could take a page from the history books and encourage a country to gift them an airliner for private use. @Iain_Treloar has close ties to Turkmenistan and could no doubt make deal in which EC gets a free airliner in exchange for helping to make Turkmenistan the cycling Mecca of the world.
For those from the UK, my top tip is to bare in mind how close much of Europe is! I regularly get the train - in a day - from Manchester to Munich for work. You get the early train, have breakfast in London, lunch in Paris and your tea in Munich: it’s mega. Our sustainability team crunched the numbers and on this journey flying is approx 10x the CO2e of the train.
Girona and a chunk of Spain, much of France, north Italy, and all of Belgium are achievable in a day from the Uk as long as you’re within a couple of hours of London on the train.
