confessing transport sins

Today, after a brief appearance on campus to teach one class, I begin a convoluted trip to Pittsburgh to attend a conference for work. As this trip has gotten closer, I’ve looked at the details of my trip and slowly realized that I messed this up good in terms of deciding how to get to Pittsburgh and back. This post is a confession of my sins!

I’m fairly transport conscious—at least for an American. I checked Amtrak to see if there was a reasonable way to get there by train, and I’m pretty sure I also checked Greyhound to see what travel by bus would be like. I do this for any conference I attend, but I usually get the same result: American trains and buses just aren’t well developed enough to support this kind of trip. At some point, I must have also done the math on driving versus flying… or at least I hope I did—maybe that’s another sin to confess. At any rate, at some point I gave in to the inevitability of flying and worked with my employer’s travel office to get some tickets booked.

Maybe it’s because I had already mentally surrendered to flying, but I don’t know that I paid close enough attention to the details of the flight before giving it the thumbs up. Today, I’ll be driving an hour and a half to get to the airport, then spending about six hours on flights before taking a 45 minute bus ride from the airport to the conference hotel. I’m proud of that bus ride: an Uber would be about 20 minutes faster, but again, I’m fairly transport conscious for an American, and if I can choose to take public transport instead of a taxi, I’m going to do it. The rest of the trip, though, is of questionable value given that I could drive all the way to the conference hotel in just over 6 hours. That would be faster, and allow me to get in (and get home) at a more reasonable hour than the inconvenient flights that I’ve chosen. Plus, my flights on the way out take me to Florida on my way to Pittsburgh, which feels ridiculous.

I’m thinking more and more that I should have asked my employer to rent me a car and drive up there. I don’t know what the difference in environmental impact would be, but a colleague attending the same conference lives in Cincinnati, not far away from where I am, and so maybe we could have carpooled together. At the very least, it bothers me that it didn’t occur to me to ask about this option instead of accepting the inevitability of airlines as the only way to go. That’s the big sin that I’m confessing here—that for all the thought I do put into this sort of thing, there’s still a lack of commitment and awareness that contributes to a sort of American transport nihilism that isn’t great for our planet.

As much personal sin as I have to commit, though, I also keep thinking about a fantastic video from Not Just Bikes that recently came out. The bigger sins are surely systemic: In a better world, there would be an easy way to get to Pittsburgh by rail, even if it were a bit slower (or still required driving up to Cincinnati). I could keep the working time that I’ll get on planes and at the airport (the one big sacrifice that would come from driving), and with less cost to the planet than either flying or driving would impose.

• macro
• Myself
• planes
• trains
• buses
• transport
• public transport
• SSSR 2024
• SSSR
• Amtrak
• Not Just Bikes
• Greyhound