If your decimated stock portfolio doesn't make you anxious enough about taking a vacation this year, a new travel website will make you feel bad about the carbon you'll generate getting to your favorite vacation spot.
The Swiss travel booking site RouteRank forces people to think about the environmental impact of their travel by determining just how much carbon is generated by different modes of travel. Information is presented in an easy-to-read table next to the fare, allowing travelers the option of choosing a trips based on the carbon footprint.
On the surface, RouteRank looks and feels similar to your typical Expedia-style travel site. Type in where you want to go and when you want to arrive and the RouteRank search engine digs through flight schedules and rail timetables to offer itineraries. It also calculates driving times, and mixes and matches different forms of transport to generate maximum travel options.
RouteRank lists all the information you'd expect from a travel website – schedules, connection times, and ticket prices – and throws in the amount of CO2 each itinerary generates. You can sort the results by price, departure time or CO2 output, making it tougher than ever to ignore the environmental impact flying to that big sales meeting or jetting off to the wine country for a three-day getaway.
People are skeptical when someone claims the ability to accurately calculate carbon emissions, but RouteRank thinks it gets it right by drawing from several sources. The company uses a comparative environmental analysis model developed by IFEU Heidelberg, a German research institute, and backs it up with information from the European Commission, universities, and transport groups.
Those calculations capture not only the emissions generated between Point A and Point B, but those produced by drilling, mining, and refining the energy used to make the trip. Auto emissions are based on a mid-sized passenger car carrying 1.5 passengers. Train calculations account for electrical variations from country to country. And RouteRank examines flight utilization (the more people on your flight, the smaller your individual carbon contribution). The site also allows drivers to customize searches by choosing the size and make of their car, the type of fuel they're likely to fill it with.
We tested RouteRank with a weekend trip from Paris to
Zurich (if you're gonna dream, dream big). It pulled up 24 different itineraries that ranged from 1.5-hour nonstop flight on Air France to a seven hour trip on a
Swiss train to an Amazing Race-style 11 hour car-train-plane combo. The site uses information from the Via Michelin website to calculate drive time between destinations.
The verdict? If going green figures highly in our travel plans, the train is the way to go. It generates only 6 kilograms of CO2, compared with
98 kilos on the plane and 147 kilos in the car. And at €86 - about $117 at today's exchange rate - riding the rails is the cheapest way to go as well. But it takes seven hours. That's plenty of time for Sudoku and drinks in the dining car, but doesn't leave much time for wandering Zurich.
RouteRank is only available in Europe right now, but we're guessing it's just a matter of time before a similar product finds it's way to the US. When it does, it will be tougher than ever to avoid thinking about how your travel impacts the environment.
Photo: Flickr/Simone Ramella
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