‘Fast Trains to Connect US Cities, Alleviate Highway Congestion’
4th September 2010
Well, no, not really.
The whole justification for trains, high-speed or otherwise, is efficiency. The argument runs: If you’ve got 100 people going from e.g New York to e.g. Chicago, then it’s more efficient for them all to ride a train than to take, oh, 73 cars to get there. It will cost less (in total), use fewer resources, emit less pollutants, take up less space, etc., etc. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it. Well, it’s not, and here’s why.
New York and Chicago are big places. A train requires you to go from your actual starting point, which may be (and probably is) different from everyone else’s starting point, and get to the virtual New York (i.e. the New York train station), get there at pretty much the same time as everybody else that’s going to Chicago (whether that’s convenient for you or not), then get on board along with everybody else that’s going to Chicago (a non-trivial exercise, as anyone who’s ridden an airplane can tell you), then ride at a speed and in a manner that is decided by somebody else (who may not, and probably does not, have your preferences at the top of his list), then arrive at the virtual Chicago (i.e. the Chicago train station), get out of the train with everybody else (a non-trivial exercise, as anyone who’s ridden an airplane can tell you), and then get (somehow) to your actual destination. Oh, and don’t get me started on what happens if you have any luggage.
This purported ‘efficiency’ of trains is efficiency from the standpoint of the people running the trains, not of the people riding them. The people riding them don’t see efficiency, they see massive inconvenience: Inconvenience in time (can’t start when you want to, don’t have any flexibility about when you start, can’t pick your own route or how long it takes to get there, can’t arrive when you want to, have to expend extra time being herded hither and yon along with a massive crowd of strangers), inconvenience in passage (you go where they want you to go, not where you want to go, and there’s no freedom to make any side trips or rest stops or whatever it might move you to do on the way), and inconvenience in environment (trains suck compared to automobiles when it comes to comfort – always have, always will). And if you don’t happen to want to go between the two points serviced by trains, then you’re out of luck.
The reason why people prefer automobiles to trains is FREEDOM. Freedom to set your own schedule and vary it to suit yourself, freedom to set your own route and vary it to suit yourself, freedom to carry as much stuff with you as your vehicle will carry (plus a trailer if it can pull one) and have it instantly available to you at your destination, and just generally freedom to run your own life instead of giving it over into the hands of service-industry bureaucrats who care about their jobs first, their own convenience second, and you dead last.
The people who push trains are at heart people who have no compunction about running your life for you because they are convinced that they are smarter than you (just talk to one sometime) and know better than you (ditto) and are therefore justified in making you do it their way rather than your way, just because they backpacked through Europe one summer during college and had a great time on the trains there. ‘Fascists’ is not too strong a term, although most of them will claim to be ‘progressives’.
Shun them. Deny them power, especially the power to steal your money through taxation and spend it foolishly on this or any other foolish scheme.
ADDENDUM: This post from Carolyn illustrates the situation very nicely:
When I was stuck on the train between New York City and my college for two hours with no dinner last year, that loaf kept me from going crazy. The same thing happened when my friends and I were stuck waiting for customs for hours on our train to Montreal. They had teased me about the bag of mini bagels I’d been shlepping around, but they sure were thankful for it later.
Who, having traveled on a train or an airplance, can’t tell a similar story? If you ask anybody in that situation, ‘Would you rather be here on this train/plane, or in a car?’, is there any doubt what the answer would be?