April 16, 2008
WHEREAS THE AUTOMOBILE IS BUILT OF LIES:
The honesty of trains (William Davies, April 16, 2008, The Prospect: First Drafts)
We are falling in love with trains all over the place at the moment. As this piece by Stephen Bayley in sunday’s Observer correctly observed, “What a horrible, inhuman, artless culture air travel has become… Trains have never been more popular and as the allure of air travel turns into ordure, they will likely become more popular still.” The new St Pancras station is the most commonly cited cause for this new exuberance, but I have a hunch that the East London Line extension is going to attain a faintly iconic status within a few years. New and stylish bridges are cropping up amongst the flats and warehouses of Hackney and Shoreditch, and the route will be enjoyably tortuous, especially as it does a U-Turn over Hoxton. A railway at this height above street level is reminiscent of the Chicago ‘L’, offering that same perspective on the urban landscape that is neither birds-eye nor pedestrian-eye.Posted by Orrin Judd at April 16, 2008 7:13 PM(I used to be a trainspotter. If you don’t believe me, I can tell you that in 1987 there was only one Class 40 operating in Britain, and I, err, spotted it. Just thought I’d get that out of my system.)
Technology always involves recreating the relationship between freedom and constraint. New freedoms involve new types of constraints. We don’t expect to be able to do anything with technology, but it helps if the technology speaks honestly to us. This honesty is central to modernism: modernists offer transparency, and with it, humanity. Like a maths student, modernist technology shows its workings, so that even if the final answer is wrong, we can sympathise. Postmodern architecture later abandoned this commitment to the facts.
We love trains because they display this honesty, while so much technology elsewhere has become deceitful and mysterious.
Like your love of Mexicans and hatred of Soccer, your love of trains is going to bump into your hatred of Europe.
Trains work in Europe, because they force them to work, and tax the goo out of people to make them work.
Your love of us "anti-intellectual" Americans will bump into our embrace of planes and cars.
Speed and convenience, and our God given right to cheap energy and travel. God bless America.
Ironically yours,
Posted by: Bruno at April 16, 2008 10:57 PMBingo! And autos dominate here because the military forced highways on us. They're exactly as ugly and antihuman as the typical militarist project. People prefer trains.
Posted by: oj at April 17, 2008 6:15 AMActually, some people prefer trains--for their purported beauty. For practical mass travel in the US, trains are absurd.
An automobile gets you where you want to go, at a time of your choosing, in comfort & privacy--no hoards of other people yelling, pushing, and shoving, no other people hogging all the good seats. Trains, not so much.
I'd love to travel by train if they could average 100mph. Most of my travel is in the 700 mile range and I'd enjoy a 7hr ride. But 16hrs? Forget about it.
Posted by: Patrick H at April 17, 2008 10:37 AMTo the contrary, everyone prefers trains which were, of course, practical for mass travel until the military undermined the railway system (you can't land planes on RR tracks). 99% of WWII soldiers reported to their bases via train.
Posted by: oj at April 17, 2008 10:58 AMTrains in England work great. Cities are very compact and close together. American cities are diffuse and widely spaced. One could imagine trains working regionally if you could take your car on them (one could nicely take the train from LA to San Diego, say, but then you couldn't get anywhere you wanted to go), but nationally they're not appropriate to a country our size (even taking a train from LA to Houston would take 2 days).
Posted by: b at April 17, 2008 11:05 AM99% of WWII soldiers reported to their bases via train.
Did the rest did so by trolley or horseback?
What a stupid statistic. Of course they did. That's because most had to "report" well beyond their local neighborhoods, and in the 1940s, the only method of mass long-distance/intercity transport available to anyone not in the upper classes was the railroad. (Yet wasn't it supposedly the mechanization of the US Army (trucks vs. horse-drawn wagons) that made a difference in Europe? Or was Patton depending on the French trains running on time another one of those things historians neglect to mention?
Like trolleys, rail passenger service died a natural death at the hands of the people and their markets. And the Greens are lready making sure that once they get their hands on the old roadbeds and rights-of-way ("rails-to-trails"), they'll never let go. So it's time to get over it.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at April 17, 2008 11:45 AMPrecisely. Trains were an efficient means of mass transportation. They only ceased to be when the military opted against them and imposed the highway system, to our eternal cost.
Posted by: oj at April 17, 2008 2:37 PMTechnology has become deceitful and mysterious?
Like nuclear medicine? Modern music? Darwinism? Journalism? Air conditioning? Wireless internet?
Some metaphors just don't cut it.
Trains are great, sometimes. Airplanes are great, sometimes. Cars are great, sometimes. I wouldn't want to take the train to Phoenix, but I for sure would like to ride around the mountain passes in CO and UT on one. Likewise, I am not going to take the train to Atlanta, Charlotte, or Raleigh (and I wouldn't pay to fly 200 miles, either).
And the day is coming when we (the family) will drive to the West Coast, stopping at lots of memorable places on the way. No punitive gas taxes until after that, please.
Posted by: jim hamlen at April 17, 2008 6:41 PM