Solarpunk Travel

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Community for those focused on sustainable travel. Our society's current levels of energy intensive and frequent travel are not compatible with life on a finite planet. We advocate for long-term slow travel to see the world, and low energy local travel to deeply experience your community. Green washing free zone.

related to sustainable travel:

[email protected] ← open to all train chatter (but note the instance is centered on the midwest USA)
[email protected] ← UK Rail and Trains
[email protected] ← UK public transport

related to travel generally:

[email protected] ← general travel
[email protected] ← general travel (this whole instance devoted to travel but note there is an instance-wide no politics rule there)
[email protected] ← Europe focus

The communities listed above are decentralized. Centralized instances are omitted as they go against the fedi purpose and it’s better to cultivate digital rights in the free world. That means instances that have a disproportionately large population or are centralized on Cloudflare are not listed.

founded 1 year ago

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Can a flight be ok to do for "holidays"? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I like travelling by bike, but i am not the biggest fan of doing roundtrips, i much prefer moving further and further away. So on longer trips i will end up way far from home, and since travelling by train across Europe, can be a real ordeal (especially with a bike), i sometimes take a plane back home. I guess busses would be an option too from some locations, i personally absolutely hate travelling by bus though. Weak excuse i know.

I am able to rationalize to myself that it is ok to take that flight, i spent now weeks doing low impact travel and can end it with a boom and still probably had less impact then with my regular life at home (i have not really done the calculation tbh). Of course, if it is reasonably easy to get home by train i will definitely prefer that, and i absolutely don't always end up taking a plane.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you ever take a flight?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm planning to fly transcontinental once every 8 years for the rest of my life, but I'm being pretty strict with myself for anything shorter than that and going train or bus. For me it's not exactly about the personal impact as much as doing it to make it easier for others in the future to do better. So every time I "suffer" a little because I take an extra day to travel by train/bus, I just think about how my doing it makes it more likely that train service with bikes will get easier for the next person to do the same thing. (Also I live in the US so most routes are much much harder than pretty much anywhere in Europe from what I hear.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Alright that sounds cool and there is something to it, showing presence in the trains with a bike, although when it's the season they're all booked out here. This usually doesn't work when i don't 100% know when i finish (and where) way in advance (unless i do the whole dismantling / packing deal).

You say it's a plan, so you have not started doing this and took your last plane like yesterday, right :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Haha, no I flew last in 2019. Did a 6 month tour in the US in 2021 and have just been doing more local tours or renting bikes since then. I'm planning on saving up and quitting work for a 3+ month journey around Europe in 5 years or so. That's the plan at least, we'll see whether life says otherwise ;)