Norway & Stats

In 1969 Bill, Ben, Julie, Anne and I visited Norway. We went in Julie’s car, and stayed in youth hostels. We had a great time.

In 1974 I went again, with Paul. We hitch-hiked and camped – until we stupidly left the tent poles behind. We didn’t go back for them because we’d done a hundred miles before we realized we’d left them, and we’d waited hours and hours for a lift at that spot. After that we stayed in youth hostels. We had a great time, anyway.

One of the highlights of that trip was a lift on a cargo ship. We went down to the quay in Ålesund and asked where the ship was going, and if there was anything we could help with in exchange for a lift. The captain laughed and said the most help we could give would be to keep out of the way while the crew worked. Then he said no ship would ever give lifts like that, but that he was feeling generous, and we could keep out of way on the boat deck and he’d take us to Trondheim.

It was a lovely sunny day as we set off. We’d been up on the boat deck enjoying the view for a couple of hours, when one of the crew, smiling broadly, called us down into the crew’s dining room, where they insisted we should eat with the crew. A big lamb and vegetable stew, absolutely delicious – and generous servings. Then we were shooed out of the way back onto the boat deck.

Around dusk we were called back down and fed again – grilled fish, potatoes and vegetables. After the meal, the captain said we should come onto the bridge and watch the approach to Trondheim. It was a beautiful night by then, the sky black but bright with stars, the sea black but bright with dancing reflections of the stars, and the coast each side of us black as we glided down Trondheimsfjord. Here and there we could see the lights of houses on the coast, and the occasional village; and on the water we could see the lights of the occasional smaller vessel.

Then Trondheim itself appeared round a headland – a blaze of lights. A magical evening.

It turned out that the captain was actually a Trondheim pilot, having a busman’s holiday filling in for the regular captain of the vessel who was on his annual leave. He told us that we really had been very lucky, and that we didn’t really have much chance of getting any more free lifts on ships.

I’d heard about Hurtigruten on my first visit to Norway. It’s a ferry service that plies up and down the Norwegian coast, all the way from Bergen to Kirkenes, calling at many towns, large and small, all the way. I’d had a good look at the map and knew that Hurtigruten spends most of its time close enough to the coast to get stunning views, often in quite narrow sounds between the mainland and large islands, or even with islands both sides.

I’ve been dreaming of a Hurtigruten trip ever since. Well, now I’ve retired, and this year I’ve finally realized my dream. It was a wonderful holiday. I went with Ben and his wife Jean. We flew to Tromsø, then boarded the Finnmarken, in which we sailed (well, dieseled really) from Tromsø to Kirkenes, then back past Tromsø to Bergen.

I’d have liked to have seen Ålesund again – it’s a particularly interesting place – but we stopped there during the night, and I didn’t even wake up. We spent an afternoon, a night and a morning in Bergen, then flew back to Glasgow.

I took thousands of photographs. Now I’ve got a digital camera I can do that. But I don’t go on holiday to take photographs – I take photographs to remember the holiday.

Hurtigruten isn’t like any ordinary ferry service. From its inception in 1893 it was envisaged not only as a service carrying people, mail, and goods from one local town to another, but also as a tourist attraction. From the start, wealthy tourists had cabins, and were served good food in the dining room.

Hurtigruten ships have always been part ferry, part cruise liner in fact. The balance between the two has shifted over the years – quite noticeably in the four decades I’ve been conscious of Hurtigruten’s existence, I think (although obviously my knowledge of the service was much less until I actually travelled on it). Talking to Norwegians in small towns, it seems that there is some concern that Hurtigruten will become even more cruise liner and less ferry in the near future, possibly giving up calling at the smaller ports altogether.

Before this holiday, I was definitely thinking in terms of being on a coastal ferry that took me on a fantastic trip, rather than being on a cruise liner. But the fact is, I’ve been on a cruise on a cruise liner. It was a fantastic trip, the trip of a lifetime, and there were elements of the coastal ferry about it – but far more of the cruise.

Simply viewed as a hotel, it was far and away the most sumptuous hotel I’ve ever stayed in, and thought of in those terms it was very reasonably priced – with the trip of a lifetime thrown in. But I’m not really a sumptuous hotel kind of person. It was certainly very comfortable, and we were certainly very well fed. But normally I’m happy to be comfortable enough and well enough fed, and to save my money for something else. If they can make a profit treating folk like that at that price, couldn’t they make even more profit treating twice the number of people half as well for 60% of the price? But they’ve probably got their business model pretty well worked out – they’ve been running the service for 115 years.

We were in almost the cheapest cabins, very much the most numerous sort. There are a few a little cheaper – inside cabins without windows or portholes. And there are various more expensive cabins and suites. If you’re only travelling a short distance, you can travel without a cabin, but you can’t get a ticket for a long trip without a cabin. There weren’t many short hop passengers. Most of the passengers were on a cruise.

There weren’t many local passengers, but we delivered a lot of goods at many of the ports, fork lift trucks scurrying in and out of the cargo deck with pallets of stuff for the local supermarket or builders’ merchant. The service is clearly still important in local goods transport. It runs daily in each direction, eleven ships each taking eleven days to do the round trip. (So you meet another Hurtigruten ship twice a day, every day, one around nine in the morning, and one around nine at night. This means, if you do the whole round trip, you see everywhere in daylight in one direction or the other – in summer, anyway.)

I thought about the issue of carbon footprint. Big ships use less fuel per tonne km than small ships, and big ships are the best transport there is in those terms. For goods transport, assuming your goods aren’t perishable and the extra time taken moving them isn’t an issue, that’s the end of the story. Taking coal or oil or steel or manufactured goods around the world, large ships are the transport of choice. Fuel consumption per tonne km is also less if the ships go more slowly, which may be acceptable for some goods.

But it’s not the same for passengers. You can cram passengers into a plane or a bus for a few hours in a way that would be quite unreasonable for days on a ship. A plane weighing 400 tonnes (at take off) might carry 420 passengers and use 140 tonnes of fuel to travel 13,000 km in 14 hours – that’s 77 mpg per passenger (good compared to a car with just the driver, but poor compared to a full car – and very poor indeed compared to a full bus or train). Finnmarken, the ship we travelled in, weighs 15,000 tonnes (gross) and carries 1,000 passengers, and does about 42 mpg (equivalent) per passenger. That’s taking no account of any goods carried – but I don’t think that’s a large part of the ship’s budget, either in financial terms or in tonnage. The cargo deck has about 1/8 the volume of the passenger accommodation.

Our trip involved flying 2,000 miles and travelling 2,150 miles in Finnmarken. So all in all, our holiday of a lifetime for three had a carbon footprint comparable to half a typical annual mileage in one car.

The relative safety of different modes of travel is something that most people have misconceptions about. They’re not helped by official statistics, indeed official statistics add to the confusion.

It’s not that the statistics are actually inaccurate, it’s that the impression they give is inaccurate. I’m inclined to believe that the statistics are accurate, but I don’t know for sure whether they are or not. The impressions they give, and the beliefs many people hold as a result, are not actually supported by the statistics, even if the statistics are true.

The basic statistic involved is the ‘fatalities per passenger mile’ figure – which is claimed to be lower for flying than for any other major mode of travel, probably truthfully.

On the face of it, ‘fatalities per passenger mile’ looks like an appropriate measure of travel mode safety. If railways carry ten times as many passengers as airlines, and have five times as many fatalities, then other things being equal, they seem to be twice as safe. Other things aren’t equal though. Passengers on planes on average travel much further than train passengers, so that’s a factor in the plane’s favour. But let’s examine this more closely.

What we really want to know is whether it’s safer to travel by plane or by train, on the journeys we actually want to make.

We don’t have enough information here to make any kind of sensible judgement at all. Plane accidents are much more likely to occur near the beginning or (intended!) end of a flight, rather than while cruising at altitude between airports. Likewise, railway accidents are much more likely to occur at railway junctions or road intersections than on long stretches of uncomplicated track between cities. This means that the statistics of accidents per passenger mile, for both trains and planes, are strongly dependent on the length of the journeys. Shorter flights, with a larger proportion of their mileage close to the airports of departure and intended arrival, are less safe (per passenger mile) than long flights; likewise, short train journeys, with a larger proportion of their mileage in the cities of departure and intended arrival, are less safe (per passenger mile) than long train journeys.

If you’re travelling thousands of miles, in general you don’t have the option of travelling by train, and if you’re travelling ten or twenty miles, in general you don’t have the option of travelling by plane. It’s only for distances of a few hundred miles where you have both options – and those are the least safe flights, and the safest train journeys. Which is actually safer? You can’t tell from the simple “fatalities per passenger mile” figure. And that’s the only figure they’re going to give you.

You can’t drive from the living room to the kitchen, either; and you can’t (in general) walk twenty miles to work and back. But going a mile to school, which is safer, driving or walking? Simple statistics for accidents per passenger mile in cars versus accidents per pedestrian mile don’t tell you.

One has to give officialdom the benefit of the doubt, and suppose that this confusion is due to their incompetence, but it’s sometimes hard not to think the obfuscation is deliberate. Airlines are the main beneficiaries of these particular misconceptions.

You have to look at statistics carefully. The implications are often not what they at first appear to be. This may or may not be deliberate misrepresentation; sometimes whoever is presenting the statistics may themselves misunderstand the implications. Very often the information you really want is actually not possible to deduce from what is presented, as in this case.

Statistics, if properly done, can be very useful in assessing relative risks – but they’re not often properly done, and even less often properly presented.

Back to the top

On to Police