The Mass Car Exodus
It’s Friday afternoon on a summer weekend, which means the traffic is terrible already. Everyone is leaving early to avoid even worse traffic that will come when rush-hour commuters are mixed with holiday-makers on the road. The problem is there’s just one viable method of getting out of the city for most people. The car. Sure, we have bus coaches (but they have to use the same clogged high-ways as cars), a few commuter train routes (but you can’t take them to your holiday), and we have some passenger trains (but they’re either too expensive or they only have destinations along limited corridors).
Trains can take you just about anywhere in Holland.
It sounds snobby to say, but I truly have Euro-envy when it comes to being able to get around without a car. I was on holiday in Holland last summer and we travelled to the most remote edges of the country where there were more sheep than humans – on trains, buses, a ferry and bikes. What’s keeping us from having these comprehensive options here in North America?
Where have all the railways gone?
It hasn’t always been this way though. A few weeks ago , I was browsing the shelves of books at the cottage, and came across Roses and Thorns: A Goodly Heritage by Gladys M. Suggitt. It’s a fascinating manual of how the early settlers around Balsam Lake, Ontario survived and thrived in the last half of the 1800s. One of the first things that struck me though was the map of south-central Ontario from 1899 on the inside flap. Some of the lines were of rivers and county boundaries, but the majority of them were railway lines!
Where did they all go? The short answer is that the Industrial Age approach to life and commerce grew exponentially with the advent of cheap and easy fossil fuels and the advent of the automobile (read Gravity Isn’t Just a Good Idea for more on this). We simply made trains obsolete. But as many people before me have quoted Albert Einstein in this context, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Meanwhile, back on the highway, trying to get out of the city it’s very clear what the problem is. This lifestyle and way of living on the planet is unsustainable. Not to say the pioneers had it all right. Trains are a direct result of the Industrial Revolution (a.k.a. the old way of thinking), and people took the trains because there were no other options. They weren’t trying to live more lightly on the planet, indeed, trains used dirty coal and yes, firewood to get around. Picture open pit mines and deforested landscape. Back then the ideal was to have land and be the master of your own destiny.
We have new necessities and ideals now. We need to get as many people around as cheaply and quickly as possible using little or no fossil fuel.
Most of the earthworks and bridges for those 1899 train routes still exist. . . why can’t we shake off some of this car-induced inertia and start using them again?
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