Where I grew up, the car wasn’t a lifestyle choice. It was the only option. The nearest town was forty minutes down a highway that had never seen a bus route, and the train was something other people took. City people. People with options. You drove because there was nothing else, and you didn’t think much about it.
So my relationship with sustainable travel has always been complicated by geography. You compost, you watch the water tanks, you turn the lights off. The land makes you conscious in those ways. But the car stays in the driveway, necessary and guilt-free, because what else are you going to do.
Edinburgh will be the first time in my life that slowness is genuinely available to me. I find that more exciting than I expected. Not as a sacrifice or a grand statement, but as something I have simply never had access to before. A bus that goes somewhere useful. A train that costs less than petrol. A city built at a scale where your own two feet are a reasonable way to get around.
I want to be honest about how I got here, because it wasn’t an environmental awakening. It was more that I have spent years watching people advocate for sustainable transport from cities where the infrastructure was already there, and it always seemed a little easy to be principled when the bus stop was around the corner. Now there will be a bus stop around the corner for me, and it would feel strange not to use it.
One of the first things I intend to do is buy a bus pass. Which sounds mundane, but for someone who has never had that option, it feels oddly significant. A small card that assumes you will be somewhere regularly enough to make a monthly commitment. That you are not just passing through.
I want to learn the routes the way you actually learn a city, not from the back seat of an Uber staring at your phone, but from a window seat on the number 23, watching the same streets enough times that they start to feel familiar.
There is something about moving through a place slowly that changes your relationship to it. You stop passing through and start belonging, even a little. That seems like the right way to spend a semester somewhere.
I am coming from a place where driving was the only option. I am going somewhere I can finally choose otherwise.
