You were going to fly 30k-50k km regardless of if you biked or drove.
The fact that you biked cut your emissions quite a bit.
A cut in emissions is still a success.
And before anyone says, but what about my electric car!?
1) it produces a ton of carbon to build your car (a year's worth of emissions for a Westerner)...
2) for at least the next 10-years, in most of the US and the EU, your car is charged by ~50% fossil fuels.
The average person's emissions are almost ~1/10th just from building their car...
Can I ask why? I struggle to think of a legitimate reason anyone would need to travel that much.
Please don't say it's for meetings.
This year is family visits and vacations.
My travel patterns were still rather low for self-conscious "frequent flyers", who would, for example, feel an absolute requirement to fly at least 50,000 or 100,000 miles on a single airline each year in order to "maintain status" so that that airline would reward them with various perks. I have "only" ever done this once. Of course, I expect even approaching the low end of a frequent flyer status is probably the top 1% carbon footprint in the world.
But I also flew about 100,000 km per year in the time before COVID and am still on track to fly about 30,000-50,000 km this year. This puts me right back among the people with the highest carbon footprints in the whole world.
There are lots of different things that people might be asked to sacrifice, not just one. And the general trend of development and rising wealth is a trend of greater energy intensity. You can find exceptions and substitutes where you can reduce energy intensity in some area without major sacrifice, but if you have to do it across the board over and over again, that's really a loss of material standard of living.