Trainspotter's Guide to the Future of the World

Paul Kennedy

The article didn't make for pleasant reading, especially for people like myself who think that efficient railway services and other forms of well-run mass transport are a subtle but nifty measure of a country's level of civilization and, in most cases, of its social and economic fabric. (Having being born in the village in northeast England where George and Robert Stephenson invented the world's first locomotive makes me biased here, but no matter.) It was a report in the Financial Times on Dec. 27 of the successful initial runs in China of an ultra-high-speed-train service, which provides an amazing under-three-hours link between the 1,100 km. that separate the cities of Guangzhou and Wuhan.

Was I irritated that the Chinese, who plan to build a rail network of 18,000 km. by 2012 (!), can legitimately claim that they have sprung to the fore in humanity's train development, overtaking at one leap the super-speed trains of Japan and France and Germany? Certainly not. After all, the People's Republic of China seems as impressive and purposeful in its planned development of railways, ports, super-highways, new cities and nuclear-power plants as it is in its control of civil disobedience and obstruction of free expression.

What was depressing to me was the laconic comment by the article's author, one of many foreign observers attending China's stunning demonstration of high-speed rail. After noting that the "Harmony Train" averaged 350 km. per hour, as compared with the maximum speed of 300 km. per hour by the Japanese and French high-speed trains, he added: "In America, Amtrak's Acela 'Express' service takes 3 1/2 hours to trundle between Boston and New York, a distance of only 300 km." Ouch.

The Acela is, as noted, America's "express" train, and only exists along parts of the Eastern Seaboard. Most rail commuters in this region have to take slower Amtrak connections, or even slower trains like the Metro-North, where the overcrowding of the cars and the bone-shaking ride makes one think this must be a train rattling across the plains of northern India. But we are the lucky ones: A large number of Americans don't have access to any rail transportation system at all.

The comparison with Japan and Europe is staggering. When I am on study leave in Cambridge, in the U.K., I can take a nonstop train to London twice a hour -- and the trip takes less than 45 minutes. On disembarking at King's Cross station, I can stroll through a tunnel to St. Pancras, and take the high-speed Eurostar train every hour to either Brussels or Paris; those trips take slightly over two hours.

Public and governmental fury over the Eurostar's problems last week was because that system is expected to work smoothly and on time, and normally does.

The high-speed Shinkansen makes it possible for someone from Tokyo to have lunch and a stroll in Kyoto in the middle of the day, and be back in the capital city by early evening. Now China is joining the club. Presumably the Gulf States will be next.

The reasons for America's laggardliness in public-rail transport is easily explained. To begin with, the initial investment in a rail network costs an awful lot of money, which national governments usually provide as a "public good." That in turn means that the taxpayer pays, which is much less disagreeable when the taxpayer can observe the satisfactory results of that investment (no one that I know in highly taxed Switzerland, for example, challenges the wisdom of maintaining its superb rail network). In America, by contrast, most of the country feels that it is handing over funds solely to support East Coast and West Coast commuters.

Then there is the American obsession with the automobile, and with aircraft. Given the sheer spread of the country (though it is slightly smaller than China in size), this once seemed to make a lot of sense and still does for many journeys today. Air travel is a fantastic conqueror of distance, and for decades car ownership has been synonymous with American individualism and love of the open road. Finally, there are considerable parts of America that are so under-populated that it would be highly uneconomical to have a rail network even one-quarter as dense as, say, Belgium's. This article is in no way arguing for an end to air and road transportation, which is simply impossible.

But it is arguing that Americans should re-think their 20th-century "walk away" from the railways that had, ironically, united the nation in the previous century. The first and most basic argument here concerns the increasingly uncomfortable conditions of traveling by air or by road these days. Virtually every major American city, and that includes cities in the South and West like Atlanta and Phoenix as well as the more obvious New York and Los Angeles, suffer from growing traffic congestion.

This artery-clogging phenomenon of millions of cars stuck on so-called "highways" is also to be observed in Seoul, Bangkok, Sao Paulo and many other cities across the globe whose citizens have embraced the cult of the automobile; but that is hardly a consolation. It simply suggests that, as the world's population rises from around 6.5 billion to around 9 billion by mid-century, and America's rises from 305 million to around 420 million, existing assumptions about dependency on the automobile will need to change.

The growing difficulties of traveling by air within one's own country are even more obvious, and were so even before the latest terrorist incident, even before the 9/11 attacks. The challenge of getting to the airport (usually by car), finding a parking spot, checking in two hours early, going through security, learning of delays and cancellations, retrieving one's luggage afterward, then collapsing exhaustedly at one's destination, seems to rise holiday by holiday, year by year. Only a fool nowadays would fly from New York to Washington D.C., because the Acela/Amtrak rail system -- even if it compares unfavorably with those of other nations -- beats such a commute by air any time.

So, why not think more ambitiously, especially when the Obama administration seems willing to spend billions and billions of dollars in all directions? And start with some obvious routes, such as Chicago-New York (1,160 km.)? A proper high-speed-train system (probably Maglev by propulsion, with modern tracks, going at 250 m.p.h.) would give hard-pressed air travelers a real alternative to the car and the plane. It is being done elsewhere. Domestic flights between Hamburg in northern Germany and Munich in the south (612 km.) are shriveling because the high-speed trains do it better. And a notable feature of the Financial Times report cited above of China's new super-train was the tidbit that those 18,000 km of high-speed track would permit much swifter travel between most provincial capitals.

This opinion piece is not just presenting food for thought for Americans; indeed, it is probably even more worthy of consideration by nations that are rapidly modernizing, such as Brazil, India, South Africa, Mexico, Egypt and the others. In all these societies, the pressures for individual car ownership and mass air travel are becoming as intense as they already are in the United States, and it will be difficult for governments to resist, or control, them. But there is no harm in trying, and perhaps the best way to do so is for continual investment and re-investment in attractive public transport, particularly in railways.

In which case, such nations will look not to America for the technologies, the planning experience and the necessary administrative know-how to develop such public networks, but will turn instead to companies in Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and, soon, probably China. (The $2.4 billion Wuhan station was designed by the French.) Perhaps the present Obama administration, which seems to have a certain sense of these matters, will strive to make the United States more competitive in this field, as it once was, many generations ago. One cannot help thinking, however, that the American preference for clogged-up highways and airports over ultra-modern rail transport will make this country increasingly look so old, so 20th-century-ish. So behind the times.

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Trainspotter's Guide to the Future of the World | Paul Kennedy