Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
however, much depends on whether hitchhiking substitutes for an additional
car trip, a bus journey, train ride or no trip at all. Hitchhiking also brings addi-
tional benefits to both car driver and hitchhiker. The driver passes the time
more quickly and stays more alert through conversation, and the hitchhiker,
while also gaining social benefits, may access local knowledge and gain an
insider's view of the place visited. Ultimately then, hitchhiking on a wide-
spread basis has the potential to improve the carbon footprint of car travel
and to open up experiential travel opportunities. However, given contempo-
rary western society's negative view of hitchhiking, it is unlikely that it will
play a significant role in slow travel frameworks in the near future without a
major institutional change in practice.
While some explanations of slow travel have not explicitly excluded car
travel (Mintel, 2009b), we are critical of its inclusion for a variety of reasons.
First, as explained above, while cars used for tourism or leisure purposes have
higher vehicle loadings, they are rarely full. Second, the 'average' car is not the
most fuel-efficient. Increasingly, car manufacturers are producing more fuel-
efficient models, but new models take several years to gain a large share of the
market. In the meantime, older, less fuel-efficient models dominate. Also,
when travelling for a holiday, families will typically take a larger vehicle, if
more than one car is available to the household, which again implies that
tourism travel by car will fail to achieve high fuel efficiency. Therefore, while
on paper, car travel, with high loadings, might appear to be able to achieve a
similar CO
2
emission per passenger km to a train, in practice this is very rarely
achieved in a tourism scenario.
There are also other factors with car use that might influence the overall
carbon footprint of a holiday. Visitors who travel to a destination by cars are
inclined to use it more when they are there. Dickinson and Robbins (2007)
found that the car was used for 40 per cent of trips less than 1km within a
UK rural destination area. Such trips can easily be walked. At the same time,
cars generate longer trips within destination areas, compared to other modes
(Dickinson and Robbins, 2007). Cars also facilitate detours on the journey to
destinations. Such detours could, however, be considered a feature of slow
travel. However, as a whole, car travel tends to facilitate unnecessary, addi-
tional, longer trips. As such, there is potential for a much greater carbon
footprint than might be assumed.
Beyond factors relating to carbon, car-based tourism is widely identified
as a problem in destination areas (Andereck et al, 2005; King et al, 1993;
Lindberg and Johnson, 1997; Liu et al, 1987; McCool and Martin, 1994;
Perdue et al, 1990). It is, for example, responsible for significant congestion
on routes to popular tourism regions such as the Alps in central Europe
(Dickinson et al, 2004; Shailes et al, 2001). These issues were covered in
Chapter 2. It is, however, worth recalling that while cars can facilitate access
to relatively remote areas, off the beaten track, there are significant environ-
mental, social and economic consequences.
Taken as a whole, there are therefore three reasons to exclude car use
from slow travel. First, car travel is inconsistent with the low-carbon travel
scenario that is a fundamental outcome of slow travel. Second, car travel can
