*sigh* just spent half an hour setting up a spreadsheet for tracking this because competition is a terrible thing
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
Soderberg numbers and relative car use
(161 posts)-
Posted 5 years ago #
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2.1 for me. Much worse than I was hoping.
Business trips and holidays giving me many more motorised trips than I was expecting.
Now to beat it in 2019...
Posted 5 years ago # -
i kept the calculation up for about 3 months, but struggled to keep it above 2.0 - so gave up. Much harder than I was expecting it to be. Wasn't so much the use of the our car but other forms ie planes/trains/taxis that were my downfall.
Posted 5 years ago # -
just spent half an hour setting up a spreadsheet for tracking this because competition is a terrible thing
Spreadsheet now set up. Actually I did it last night, but LibreOffice crashed on me before I had done a second save, and I lost 45 minutes' tinkering time when I should've been in bed anyway.
My Soderberg number is currently 0.25, as I haven't ridden my bike at all this year so far, but I did walk to lunch on New Year's Day. I'm including walking in my active travel component of the Soderberg calculation, although my bike-only Soderberg number is currently 0.
Now off to modify my spreadsheet to include "other" options for active travel, private motorised and public transport, and maybe a summary table of percentages. Of course, this newfound enthusiasm may be tempered by my longer standing spreadsheet that I keep at work for measuring my work-related carbon footprint (and by way of its data, could generate a work-only Soderberg number if I wanted).
Posted 5 years ago # -
Are we counting 'going for a walk' type walking or just walking as transport?
Posted 5 years ago # -
I count walking if I think a normal person* would make that journey by car or bus. So walking to work (~2 miles) counts, walking to the shops (~1 mile) doesn't.
If I didn't, I'd end up counting walking the dogs, a denominator of 365 and no incentive to walk anywhere else.
I also count anything which is above and beyond walking - so I count days when I clear and grit the pavements on the street and I'm definitely counting yesterday when I only walked a couple of miles but picked up 6 bin bags of rubbish at the same time.
*i.e., someone who doesn't have spreadsheet for calculating Soderberg numbers.
Posted 5 years ago # -
"...walking to the shops (~1 mile) doesn't."
Unfortunately, it seems quite normal to some to drive excruciatingly short distances. Some people would drive to their own bathroom if they could find somewhere to park.
Posted 5 years ago # -
@wingpig:
I think the inclusion of any journey in a Soderberg calculation is simply where one might reasonably (or unreasonably) have used another form of transport for it. Perhaps there is a de minimis aspect to it, as the calculation is really about offsetting non-active travel.
Going to my local shop to buy milk is a five minute walk or an even shorter bike ride, and it would be ridiculous to use infernal combustion purely for that, although I suppose I could. I would normally only patronise the shop by IC if it was simply the end point of a journey I was already making. But walking to lunch on NYD was a journey that might have been done in a car (albeit as a passenger), particularly if the weather was bad. I would probably have walked regardless, actually, on point of principle.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Unfortunately, it seems quite normal to some to drive excruciatingly short distances.
Fair point. I've seen neighbours drive to the wee shop round the corner. It's a 1km round trip on foot, but a bit further in a car as you have to do a loop. By the time you factor in getting the car out of the garage, traffic lights and parking it can't be any quicker than walking.
Posted 5 years ago # -
I'd also like a stewards ruling on overnight travel (e.g. trains & ferries) as I seem to be punished double for taking them rather than flying...
Can we agree they only impact the day of departure and not arrival.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Hankchief, I thought you were the steward.
I would say you count each journey made per transport-type only once, so you would choose either the day of departure or the day in which the majority of the travel was made, but be consistent about it. If however you were on holiday, onboard a Trans-Siberian Railway train to Vladivostok, you would be obliged to register six days' motorised travel and not just one.
My spreadsheet now calculates small and large Soderberg numbers and has a YTD chart. My large Soderberg number is improved by my not owning a car, but my small Soderberg number may be worsened by having a motorbike, which I use as I would a car for certain journeys but without much of the congestion-causing negative effects.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Can we agree they only impact the day of departure and not arrival.
Sounds fair. Similar to the discussion @gembo and I had earlier about whether cycling at midnight counted for both days (we agreed it didn't).
Posted 5 years ago # -
Currently at Sodn = 1.21. Must try harder!
Posted 5 years ago # -
Had a chat with a climate change person at work today and discovered that the carbon footprint of driving and getting the ferry (with car - unsure how this would add up different if you were a foot passenger) to Lewis was actually larger than flying there from Edinburgh,mostly as ferries are very fuel hungry. But this was a very specific calculation that took into account stuff like plane size and circuitous route to get car to ferry and onwards. We had an interesting conversation re whether that should be the only factor in your transport decisions given it looks like it will be a lot easier to decarbonise ferries than aeroplanes in the near future.
About to damage my number by getting a bus to the pub because it's v damp out. If work hadn't had me up north using a hire car it would be boastable!
Posted 5 years ago # -
Hmm. Yes but - the ferry will go anyway, and the relative impact of putting an additional car and human on it and pushing it along on the sea will be tiny. The plane will also likely go anyway (although airlines are much more ruthless about cancelling flights and rescheduling uneconomic ones than regulated ferry companies) but the carbon intensity of lifting even a few additional kilograms into the air is much higher so a plane taking off with an empty seat is a more powerful carbon reduction than a ferry setting sail with an empty berth*
* I have not done these calculations, this is pure handwaving but I'm willing to bet.
Posted 5 years ago # -
And I thought my spreadsheet was fancy with a monthly breakdown, but I see I'm going to need to add graphs
Posted 5 years ago # -
I seem to recall that when my brother and I went to Cape Town we emitted similar levels of CO2 from our journeys. He drove while I flew. Although it was a very crude calculation and probably didn't include ferry emissions.
The aircraft is also emitting it's emissions at altitude where they can do more damage to the atmosphere, while the Ferry is emitting them at low level where the dirty diesel emissions may do more harm to nearby living organisms.
Posted 5 years ago # -
My drug dealer Big Ash at appellation wines is always trying to get me to try new world wines. He says their carbon footprint coming on boats from the antipodes smaller than my favoured wines coming from Portugal on a lorry.
Posted 5 years ago # -
I guess the difference comes in the total impact of said lorry or said cargo ship. The carbon produced (for example) per KG per KM is far higher in a lorry (60 to 150g) than the cargo ship (10 to 40g) but maybe if we had more locally focused economies and tastes, then that cargo ship wouldn't have had to sail from NZ/Aus to the UK!
So I'd stick with your portugal vino collapso rather than the alternative antipodean Vino Put-another-shrimp-on-the-barbi-o
Posted 5 years ago # -
@arobcomp, yes I have a very elegant Santa Euphemia Touriga Nacional that reminds me somehow of violets. When you open it there must be some kind of evaporation effect as soon there is none left and you cry.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Well, getting to the end of the year ... I have a personal S of 2.43 (large) 2.04 (small) but our household one is 0.42 / 0.37. I have discovered I cycle around 2 days out of every 3 (I would have guessed higher). The other half will basically only cycle if bribed to do so with food (e.g. meeting for lunch or going to the farmers' market). For a rural household with effectively no bus service it's not bad though
Posted 4 years ago # -
I assumed I was the only one still doing this.
With the advantage of living in a city I'm on 3.9 (7.2 large), though less cycling and more bus/car over the holidays will see that drop off.
Last year was 3.4 (4.8 large), not sure why my use of public transport has apparently fallen off so much.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Sally beat me to it. I was thinking yesterday that I'd give a two-week warning for the end of the year, but after tea I read my book instead. My small Soderberg number is remarkably consistent, while my large Soderberg number is quite variable.
Posted 4 years ago # -
It's rare for me to miss an opportunity to track data, but I shall do so for next year.
To check: it's a ratio of days including bike travel / days including any other form of non-walking travel? And the large is solo, small is with passengers?
Posted 4 years ago # -
Large excludes public transport from the denominator.
Posted 4 years ago # -
@Frenchy, that was my understanding too but the first mention of Large vs Small in this thread seems to suggest that large is where you are the only occupant of the vehicle.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Without having tracked any data, I'd guesstimate my large is something between ~36 and ~16. Small will be wrecked since starting my bike-train-bike commute to Glasgow in August. (numbers will significantly drop when staying with family down South in the next two weeks though).
Posted 4 years ago # -
Just downloaded my location history from google - it looks like it includes transport type. So I might be able to work mine out by the end of the year!
Posted 4 years ago # -
For me:
small = bike days / any motorised transport days
large = bike days / private motorised transport daysI don't take any account of number of occupants.
Contrary to Gembo's legal opinion - if I go out for the night on the bus and come home in the wee small hours of the next morning, I refuse to count that as two days on the bus.
I did count the sleeper as two days.
I also made myself count two days for taking my car to the garage for repair and collecting again the next day. That annoyed me.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Yes, HankChief is the final arbiter but large is bike days / private car days and small is bike days / any motorised transport. Household scores are calculated by multiplying the individual S numbers for each occupant.
Posted 4 years ago #
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