Paul Kennedy: A Trainspotter's Guide to the Future of the World
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 kilometers that separate the cities of Guangzhou and Wuhan.
Was I irritated that the Chinese, who plan to build a rail network of 18,000 kilometers 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 purposeful in its planned development of railways, ports, 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 kilometers per hour, as compared with the maximum speed of 300 k.p.h. by the Japanese and French high-speed trains, he added: “In America, Amtrak’s Acela ‘Express’ service takes three-and-a- half hours to trundle between Boston and New York, a distance of only 300 kilometers.” 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 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 Britain, 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 recent problems was because that system is expected to work 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 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. In America, 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, 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....