LONDON: Even by his own standards of incoherence, George W Bush pulled a cracker when he declared Americans to be ‘addicted to oil’ and thus managed to be wrong twice in three words. They are not addicted — there is no compulsion involved — they are obsessed. And not with the gloopy gallon itself, but with the motor car that it propels.
The distinction matters, pointing as it does to the truth of Bush: in seeking ‘alternative’ fuels, he seeks only new ways to feed the beast; he hasn’t the slightest intention, now or ever, of actually slaying it. The almost constitutionally enshrined American love affair with its wheels, so insatiable that the car population now equals that of the human adult — one per person and right up there with inalienable rights — is once again safely, powerfully ratified.
The British scale of gas guzzling, though expanding alarmingly, is not yet so severe; we still share one car between more than two of us and, so far, our culture is not infiltrated in the same way. Consider: ask an American how far is town A from city B, and he won’t give miles but, routinely, the number of motoring hours between them. Ask a Briton and his measure, even now, is the train: Brighton is ‘less than an hour’ and Manchester ‘two-and-a-half hours’ from London, just as, once, was measured the route from Boston to New York, back when America had trains, back before their absence made way for the car cult to reach saturation. Lessons for us? Let’s take a minute.
The Americans’ desertion of their railways was, in fact, dreadfully fickle, given all that they owed them. Indeed, the Union, whose state Bush was addressing last week, was physically created by the railroad, from the ‘iron horses’ of the early 1800s to the transcontinental link, completed in 1869 — and on to a network, unimaginable today, of 254,000 miles, carrying 1.2bn passengers, by 1920. The rapid transport of people, products and raw materials revolutionized trading; it linked a nation, but if you want to break your heart, stop, now, anywhere in the vastness of flyover America and see what’s left. Peek under the galloping kudzu vine and you’ll find the rust: a sleeper here, a bumper there, a chunk of sorry locomotive.
Amtrak’s limited services clack on, though a third of its income is reluctant government subsidy, and if some freight still rides the track, people do not: in the heyday of 1920, 96 per cent of intercity passenger travel was taken by train; by 1987, that was a barely recordable three per cent.
Explanations depend upon whom you ask. Certainly, successive administrations of the 20th century turned their attention, and funding, to the new toys of airports and highways. Fewer subsidies raised train fares; the Depression didn’t help; the movement of wartime troops by train in the 1940s squeezed out Joe Public; there were dodgy deals, inept organizations, mass car production — and the advent of the also polluting aeroplane (but let’s go there another day).
Republicans and businessmen argue that this was natural evolution; Democrats and environmentalists prefer to say it had more to do with foul play from the lousy sots in the oil and motor industries. Somewhere between the two, a nation neglected its safe, boring, dependable machine; its dear old railways were not, any longer, loved as they once were. Some green optimists claim that the railroad decline could still be reversed. But I spend months every year in the US and I don’t believe it.
Culture runs deeper than common sense and just as the car has become culturally accepted, so the train is culturally discarded; even where they exist, they are dismissed as carriers of the lower orders.
There is no longer, even, debate. Trains are gone for good and if you want to get there overland you drive; the people know it, Bush knows it and Kyoto be damned. Well, all right, whispers the ugly xenophobe we all keep tucked behind our ears, so what do you expect? That’s Americans for you.
But then we look to Britain. To the publication last week of a Department of Transport consultation paper, with new procedural rules for closing British railway stations; in fairness, these demand that various factors must be taken into account, but value for money, or vfm as they nattily call it, remains firmly the first of them.—Dawn/The Observer News Service
