Goethe once wrote:

“All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience”.

On this subject, I had been thinking about ways to subtly encourage people to take any transport but planes when going on holiday. In particular, I was thinking about Europe, and how you can get from one side to the other in 24-36 hours by train, if you really want to.

But late-2019 reality is that not many people really want to, for a combination of reasons:

1. That’s a long time to be travelling, just to get to Krakow!

2. It will probably be more expensive than flying

3. It will require booking several trains from several companies, which is head-hurting

4. It will eat into your stock of “days off” from work.

This stock is at least 25 days [EDIT: it’s 20 days] in Europe, and even though this may seem a lot to US citizens, travelling for a day or more each way is non-negligible if you have “only” 25 [EDIT: 20] days. (Let’s keep off the subject of trains and days off in the US for today.)

The first two points above are likely price sensitive and to an extent, culturally sensitive (think: flight shaming in Sweden).

The third point is a technical issue, solvable if there is enough institutional will in Europe (this is en route, likely in the next five years).

As for the last point, I had a (minor) epiphany: Why not make it European law that travel time not be included in the legal number of days off if you are taking trains, not planes?

This seems like an obvious step forward. The clear “winners” would be Europe’s train companies. The “losers” would be companies having to give slightly more days off at the same employee cost.

I was all joyful about my new thought, and getting exciting about sharing it.

Then I stumbled across a BBC article from last month entitled, Some firms give more time off to those who shun plane travel.

Not only is my idea not new, but it turns out it was already implemented by the UK ethical insurance company Naturesave back in 2009!

“Matthew Van Den Elst, Naturesave’s legal director, says this was sparked by a conversation between a staff member planning a European holiday and a director who happened to be a fan of train travel. The employee mentioned the extra time and cost of travelling by train, “despite both agreeing it would be preferable environmentally and a more pleasant journey”. So the company decided to encourage this by allowing additional annual leave for environmentally-friendly travel. A quarter of staff members have since taken them up on it.”

Furthermore, a new initiative called Climate Perks by the UK-based charity 10:10 Climate Action intends to encourage the same idea across more and more workplaces. It has signed up 16 companies already.

The more I think about it, the more it seems obvious that this kind of thing has to be expanded to Europe as a whole. There must surely be a price/extra days/time tradeoff at which train travel simply becomes the obvious choice within Europe.

Now all we have to do is keep sharing this idea, thinking it over again and again, until it takes root in our own personal experience.

Please share it and help it prosper.