As a result of being based in a shared regional office, I’m in the strange professional position that my desk is about 30 miles away from the geographical area I cover. This setup results in a fair amount of unavoidable travel from the office to the people and places that my eyes need to see.

For my first few years in the role, I tackled this by driving a lot. This was convenient, especially because my parked car could often become a ‘mobile office’ where I could catch up on work, chair teleconferences, and even sometimes deliver online teaching sessions. I even bought a desk that clipped onto my steering wheel to assist with this.

I came to realise, though, that this wasn’t great for a person whose job is focused on protecting the health of the public. I drive a small car, but I was still no doubt emitting more carbon than I needed to be. I therefore made a special effort to start using public transport whenever possible… but there were two problems with this.

The first was that I wasn’t all that convinced that this was truly helping the carbon issue. Typically, it meant taking a diesel-powered train or bus, often as one of only a handful of passengers. But I decided that this was out of my control, and I had to trust the system to do the right thing: if I adopt the ‘right’ behaviour, then it’s up to others to make sure that it counts.¹

The second was that it didn’t seem to be possible all that often. I’d either have back-to-back meetings, or there would be a teleconference straight after a meeting, or the transport timing didn’t line up, or the venue wasn’t especially accessible. Basically, I still ended up driving quite a lot.

I’ve noticed something interesting, though: post-pandemic, I’ve found this transition to public transport somewhat easier. I’ve taken public transport much more often. As I sat on the train back from James Cook this week, I was pondering why this was. I think there are maybe five factors.

The first is that in-person meetings have become much rarer these days. Online meetings have become the default option, even for things where they were previously considered impossible. This means that I don’t feel so bad about taking slightly longer to travel to and from them, and that the occasions where I have back-to-back in-person meetings at poorly connected places have become far more unusual.

The second is that I’ve genuinely adopted a mindset of public transport being the default, which has been helped by the break in physical meetings occurring. This has resulted in a subtle but significant change in my thinking: if I can’t do two meetings because they are geographically incompatible, then I’ll have to miss one of them. If I’m supposed to be chairing a meeting when I’m scheduled to be on a bus, then the meeting is going to have to move or find another chair. The option of driving has become a last resort, whereas it was more of a second-preference before, despite my intentions.

The third—possibly related—is that I’ve become phlegmatic about public transport disruptions. If I am supposed to be somewhere, but public transport lets me down, then I no longer feel a sense of responsibility about that. I plan my days with reasonable buffers to account for predictable problems, but if exceptional events disrupt it, then that’s out of my control. The same was always possible when driving, in any case.

The fourth is that technology has moved on. I can now do a lot more when I’m on public transport than I could before. Most of these changes are relatively ‘soft’. People often default to chatting to me on Microsoft Teams instead of phoning, which turns out to be much easier to handle on a noisy train. More services have moved to the cloud, which means that I can do more work on my phone rather than having to try to balance a laptop on my knee on the bus.

Finally—and I’ve only realised this belatedly—I have a responsibility to role-model behaviour that accords with an understanding of the threat posed by the climate crisis. I’m not claiming to be an environmental saint by any means: my overall patterns of behaviour are probably quite poor. Yet, it doesn’t really inspire change if the doctor in charge of protecting the public from environmental hazards is happy to drive everywhere. I realised this after I recently gave some junior colleagues an email address, and the only thing I had to hand to write on was a used bus ticket: they looked at it as though they’d never been on a bus before, and it set me thinking.

It will be interesting to see whether this changes over time.

1. This is a position I also adopt on recycling. I sometimes read about questionable recycling practices, such as allegations that plastic recycling ends up in landfill or in the ocean or whatever. But I’m not in charge of that. If I’ve reduced and reused as much as I can, and presented my recycling according to the supplied guidelines, then I just have to trust that the ‘system’ will do the rest.