We think travel is a good thing. 

It can give us a break from our daily routine.

It can help us learn more about the world. 

It can introduce us to other peoples, countries and cultures. 

On a good day, it can open our minds and maybe even our hearts.

It can make us happy.

But, like virtually all human activities, travel comes with costs as well as benefits.

We're probably not telling you anything new if we tell you that the climate crisis is one of the biggest challenges (some would say, the biggest) we face as a species. 

Whether we like it or not, at a global scale we're going to have to find ways of limiting our greenhouse-gas emissions if we're to get through the 21st century with a habitable planet.

Within Europe, transport is responsible for a growing proportion of greenhouse gas emissions — in fact it's the only sector that has seen an increase in emissions since 1990.

So, while overall we think that travel is a Good Thing, it's also responsible for a significant, and rising, proportion of greenhouse-gas emissions — and that's a really quite a Bad Thing.

But there is good news.

Because, while some forms of transport —like planes and petrol and diesel cars —are pretty dire in terms of their climate impact, other modes — hello trains! hello bicycles! — are much more efficient.

Summary of what we've learned so far

• Bikes: brilliant (but go easy on the hamburgers) 

• Ferries: pretty good (but look out for local air-quality effects)

• Planes: bad (especially short-haul)

• Cars: bad (especially if only one or two occupants)

• Trains: brilliant (especially if they're electric, double-especially if their electricity is nuclear or renewable-generated)

• Walking: perfect for short distances. Perhaps surprisingly — not as good, in greenhouse-gas-emission terms, as cycling. (The easiest way to make sense of this is to imagine cycling 50km before lunch. If you're reasonably fit, you could probably do that without too much trouble. Walking 50km bfore lunch — well, you might manage if you start around 2am, but you'll be mighty hungry when you hit the finishing line.) Also, go easy on the hamburgers.

OK, so what has all this got to do with the 33rides project?

We think that bikes and trains are best way to get around.

For lots of reasons. 

(In this article we've focused on the climate angle, but we're also thinking about urban environments and aesthetics, health, opportunity and happiness — we'll have more to say about these another time.)

So we want to use the 33rides project to showcase and promote bikes and trains as the best choice for fun, flexible, low-carbon-emissions travel, adventure, and also general day-to-day getting around.

It's a message that we hope will resonate, and perhaps we'll encourage or inspire someone else to try travelling more by bike or by train. (If that's you, we'd be delighted to hear from you! Drop us a line to say hi.)

But (and here's the harder part) we know that choosing to cycle to work, or take the train for your next holiday, doesn't always seem easy. 

There are all sorts of reasons for this, ranging from availability of information, to cost, to perceptions of safety, which will be the subject of a future article. (Maybe more than one article.)

Some of these are quite hard to solve at the individual level — they will require action from governments, rail companies, local authorities and others.

And that's another 33rides objective: to learn more about what's already good, and what could be better, about train and bike travel in Europe. And to make connections with others who are already working in this area (you'll find some of them here).

We hope that the 33rides project will be able to contribute something to the wider goal of making travel better for our health, better for the communities in which we live, and better for the planet.