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Monthly articles (English and French) on the theme "Querying economic orthodoxy"
No. 20 - August 2007
Back on the Rails
ANGUS
SIBLEY
Herein, I think, lies the chief attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of he country; and while the body is borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations; they make haste up the poplar alley that leads toward the town; they are left behind with the signalman as, shading his eyes with his hands, he watches the long train sweep away into the golden distance.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Ordered South in Virginibus Puerisque (1881)The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
G K Chesterton, The Prehistoric Railway (1909)Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take
No matter where it's going.
Edna St Vincent Millay, Travel, part I, lines 11 - 12The reasons for rail decline go deeper than the obvious facts of the transport market. The basic problem for railways has been philosophical.
Rail revival at last
The railway world is emerging at last from a long, dark tunnel. For decades, rail - especially passenger rail - has been seen as an obsolescent mode of transport, doomed to give way to the speed of the aircraft and the freedom of movement of the automobile. Many countries have neglected their rail network, some to a degree that has made Railtrack's misconduct (1) look trivial. Some have even come close to abandoning rail altogether.
By 1968, US railroads were operating no more than 500 or so long-haul passenger trains a day, compared with 15,000 at the start of World War II and 20,000 in the late 1920s (2). Today Amtrak, the operator of all passenger trains in the USA apart from commuter services, runs (3) only about 300 medium and longer-distance trains daily.
The South American story is even worse. In Argentina, a country well endowed with railway routes, passenger services (except on the suburban lines around Buenos Aires) are now very few and infrequent; most long-distance trains run only once or twice a week. In Brazil, the situation is no better. In Colombia, apart from the Medellín metro, there are no passenger trains at all except for a steam-hauled weekend tourist train that runs from Bogotá northwards.
In Europe, rail has held its own much better, but there have been severe cutbacks in some countries, especially in Britain where the network mileage, savagely pruned by the notorious Dr Beeching (4) in the 1960s, is half what it was in 1950. No doubt this reflects the British habit of blindly following where America leads, be it closing down railways or going to war in Iraq.
Route kilometers (thousand) 1950 and 1984
Britain France
Germany (west) Italy Poland Spain Switzerland
The years of declineWhy did passenger railways decline so drastically in many, but not all, countries in the mid-twentieth century? Clearly, the development of the car and the aircraft destroyed the railways' monopoly of passenger transport. Yet the demand for transport in general has increased strongly as people have grown more affluent. Railways could not hope to supply all that additional demand, but they could have retained a considerable volume of traffic - a smaller share of a bigger market. Governments, which owned most of the world's railways, could have continued to invest in their systems and to encourage their use. In some countries, they did so. In many others, they very clearly did not.
An anti-rail philosophy
I have a theory that helps to explain this phenomenon. The reasons for rail decline go deeper than the obvious facts of the transport market. The basic problem for railways has been philosophical. A railway is by nature a fixed, constrained, highly regulated system in which passengers mingle and travel together.
But the philosophy that took over the world in the mid-twentieth century, notably in the 1960s, is dominated by the notions of deconstraint, of deregulation, of individualism. It repudiates the idea that we are a society of people doing things together, preferring the ideal of everyone doing his (or her) own thing individually. Travel any time you like, not when the railway timetable says you can. Drive your own car, rather than share a railway carriage with other travellers.
In this ideological climate, railways had little chance. For Reagan, Thatcher and other politicians of their kind, the railway was not merely a pestilential consumer of taxpayers' money; it was also a relic of the bad old days of corporatism, of institutional regulation, of state-sponsored public services, of the coherent society rather than the amorphous throng of free-wheeling individualists.
Ordered freedomRailways, from their beginnings, offered freedom of movement unknown in the age of the horse; but it was an ordered freedom. Trains have always had to move along fixed rails, according to regular schedules, under the orders of signalmen. A railway is a highly constrained system. It is also, in principle, a non-competitive system; it is difficult (5) for separate train operators to compete over a single route, and it is usually (6) uneconomic to have more than one route between any two points.
So the railway does not appeal to followers of that libertarian dogmatist, Margaret Thatcher's favorite economist, Friedrich von Hayek, for whom freedom meant simply absence of constraint, and for whom maximum competition was absolutely essential.But Hayek's ideas - minimal government, markets left to their own devices, disdain for all forms of central planning, unbridled competition - have dominated the world from the 1970s to the present. No wonder railways have had a thin time. People who lived by the Sixties gospel of throwing over traditional restrictions of all kinds, pursuing the ideals of maximum personal freedom, unlimited choice and complete flexibility, had no wish to be confined in their movements by train schedules. They embraced flying for their longer journeys because it offered unbeatable speed. But for all other movements, the car was the only way.
Yet today we are seeing a major revival of the passenger train all over the world. Amtrak, the state-owned enterprise which, flagrantly defying US economic orthodoxy, acquired in 1971 the moribund passenger services of the private-sector railroads, is slowly extending and improving its network. In Europe, very high speed trains, running at up to 200 mph on the new Paris-Strasbourg route and almost as fast on many others, are taking over much inter-city traffic from the airlines. Several Latin American countries are reviving their dead or dying passenger routes. Many countries are building new high-speed inter-city railways; cities all over the world are developing metros and tramways.Disillusion with derestriction
We are coming at last to understand the limitations of the Sixties philosophy. Difficult facts stare us in the face. Unlimited freedom to drive leads to intolerable congestion and pollution; so we see the point of pedestrian-only streets, of Ken Livingstone's congestion charge (7) in central London. Freedom to fly everywhere at little cost - a triumph for the free-marketeers who deregulated the airlines - contributes to potentially disastrous changes in our climate.
Railways, and transport in general, illustrate some very interesting facts about freedom, overlooked by dogmatic libertarians who regard absence of constraints and restrictions as an absolute good. Let us glance a few of these facts.
* The individual's freedom of movement can very easily become damaging to society. But some kinds of movement are less damaging than others. The electric train does not clog our streets, is less accident-prone than road transport, does not pollute the city atmosphere, makes little noise, is generally unobtrusive. Freedom pure and simple is not enough. We need to seek kinds of freedom that are not detrimental to our neighbours.
* Constraints can enhance freedom. Compare the bus, in theory "free" to go anywhere, with the train, confined to its rails. Which is the more free from congestion and delay? The train gains from being restricted to a reserved track, separated from other vehicles. The restraining rails allow it to travel more quickly, smoothly and comfortably, with less consumption of energy per passenger mile (8).
* Unlimited freedom of movement is not necessarily a benefit. Once it becomes possible to rush around the world at a hectic pace, then the rush tends to become obligatory. The competitive pressures of business life force many people to "spend half their lives in airports" - a way of life that is neither agreeable nor healthy. Some busy world travellers felt relieved when Concorde was put out to pasture. It was no longer possible to go from London or Paris to New York and back in a day; so they could no longer be expected to do so! Think back to the age of the great trains. Then, too, people travelled assiduously on business; but they travelled at a more leisurely pace, by train and steamer, because those were the only possible ways. And what splendid trains they had in those days!
* We tend to think that constraint is a nuisance, an intrusion upon our freedom. But a train that runs off its constraining rails wrecks itself, kills its passengers and may seriously damage its surroundings. On the railway, the constraint imposed by the rails and signals is not a nuisance; it is what makes the whole thing possible.
* When people make a mess of their lives, we say they have "gone off the rails". This metaphor is very apt. Social and institutional order, discipline and stability are necessary to keep wayward human nature from running amok and wrecking itself, like a derailed train. One cannot help but notice how many more ruined people there are on the on the streets, apparently 10,000 to 15,000 in Paris alone, since strategies of economic deregulation took over from the 1970s onwards, making our economies more fluid and flexible, with much less stability of employment. In other words, making the economy less like a railway network, more like a road network. More "free", as economists say with approval, but also more precarious and unstable. Too many "destructured" people, as a French doctor (9) involved in caring for people on the streets has put it; people who "live without any calendar", for whom "the future does not exist". There are those who say that the penniless vagabond is "freer" than the respectable citizen. But who wants that kind of "freedom"?
The worldwide revival of passenger trains, metros and tramways reflects more than a shift in transport policies. It shows that the philosophy of negative freedom, the notion that all will be well if we simply free ourselves of artificial constraints, has hit the buffers. Today, weary of the sad and painful consequences of the long twentieth-century obsession with deconstraint, we are coming to recognise once again the need for order and stability - two basic characteristics of railways.
* * * * *
References
1 Railtrack plc, a company listed on the London Stock Exchange, owned the railway tracks and stations in Britain between 1994 and 2002. Railtrack's failure to maintain the permanent way adequately led to serious accidents. It was superseded by a not-for-profit company, Network Rail, in 2002.
2 Kevin Hillstrom, Railraods in the Modern Era, in The Industrial Revolution in America: Railroads (ABC-CLIO Inc., Santa Barbara (California), 2005), page 267
3 See the Amtrak annual report, 2006, page 6
4 Dr Richard Beeching (later Lord Beeching) was chairman of the British Transport Commission and British Railways Board from 1961 to 1965. He produced two reports recommending drastic cutbacks in the rail system. Implementation of his first recommendations led to the rapid closure of about one third of the network mileage. The rejected proposals in his second report would have reduced British Railways to a bare skeleton of trunk lines.
5 There are various reasons for this difficulty. One is that if two competing operators run trains alternately over the same route, then either company's tickets will (if the companies do indeed compete on fare levels) be valid only on one train out of two. The advantage of having a frequent service will thus be lost.
Another is that quarrels can arise over which company's train has priority.
Yet another is that trains using the same track cannot overtake each other. However, believe it or not, this problem was avoided by certain horse-drawn trams in nineteenth-century Paris. Some of their wheels had no flanges, so that a tram could run off its rails, overtake the tram in front, and then return to the track! This "astonishing peculiarity" is described in Le tramway, de "l'américain" au metro léger, published in 2001 by RATP, the state-owned operator of Parisian public transport.
6 There are exceptions for some very busy traffic corridors. For example, between Edinburgh and Glasgow there are at present three distinct routes, and a disused line (between Bathgate and Drumgelloch) is to be reopened, which will bring the total to four.
7 A large area in central London is subject to a "congestion charge" levied on any chargeable vehicle which enters, leaves or moves within the area. The charge is £8 (= €12 or $16) per day. This system was introduced by Ken Livingstone, mayor of Greater London, in 2003 and extended in 2007.
8 Energy consumption in British thermal units per passenger mile (2001):
Domestic airlines 3,890 Passenger cars 3,597 Motor bus 3,698 Amtrak 2,100 Source: US Government Bureau of Transport Statistics, table 4-20
9 Jacques Hassin, Vivre dans la rue en 2007, in Le Monde, 19 July 2007