In an article last year, I suggested
that environmentally-conscious travelers should take the train.
Recently I’ve been taking my own advice: On weekdays, once I get from
my home in the country to my current contract office, I take the
Toronto subway everywhere from there. On my recent trip to London, I
took the Underground and National Rail everywhere, which entailed lots
of walking (and since every minute spent walking adds three minutes to
your healthy life, that is no sacrifice) and also entailed the kindness
of my out-of-town hosts to pick me up at the nearest station. I took
the ultramodern and luxurious (and expensive) Heathrow Express
high-speed train from the city to the airport.
In San Jose
last month, I took the (underused) LRT between the airport and the
conference centre. I’ve taken the commuter ‘GO’ train into and out of
Toronto (and would take it more often if it came nearer to where I
live). I’ve taken the Canadian national passenger rail system train
‘VIA’ to London Ontario and to Montreal. I’ve been on the Metro in
Montreal and Paris, and tram cars in San Francisco, Toronto and
Frankfurt.
Other than the fact they all ride on rails, the above
user experiences have nothing in common. Comfort, cost, speed,
amenities, efficiency, reliability, service and convenience are all
over the map. (No I take that back: They all have one other thing in
common – they are all money-losing propositions.)
To the extent they replace automobile miles and are reasonably full, they are reducing greenhouse gas emissions and are therefore a ‘green’ form of transportation. Some of them are not losing a lot
of money. And if drivers were charged the full cost of the road damage
they caused, rent on the vast amount of real estate that has to be
paved over to accommodate them, and the remediation cost of the
incremental pollution they cost, they would be losing a lot more money
than the rail services plying the same routes. So why aren’t we
following the example of some European countries and investing in rail
big-time?
The main reason is cultural: Many people hate
traveling with strangers, and will do and pay almost anything to avoid
it (especially when they are reimbursed or given a tax deduction for
doing so). The busiest (and often least unprofitable) rail systems
offer few amenities to passengers to allow them to do useful things
while they’re in transit, so they cannot improve productivity as much
as they might. Because they’re relatively cheap, they tend to attract
some rather peculiar and sometimes anti-social and even criminal
passengers, making some routes unpleasant and even unsafe. And because
they’re not door-to-door, they require people to walk a lot more,
sometimes in poor weather, which involves trading off time expended now
against increased life expectancy later – a tough choice.
The
second reason is that, to be useful, rails need to be added in very
busy places, displacing existing uses of space at great cost in public
inconvenience (during construction), noise and expropriation. Where
they use existing routes, they need to compete with freight trains for
scarce rail resources – and freight is a more profitable use of these
resources, and also saves greenhouse gas emissions compared to truck
shipment.
For these two reasons, rail has now, in most places,
fallen short of the ‘tipping point’ at which it becomes sensible to rip
up and displace existing land use for the benefit of social and
environmental savings. A recent study by the very progressive Toronto
government concluded that it made more economic sense to add ‘high
occupancy vehicle’ (HOV) lanes (available only to cars with 3 or more
passengers) to reduce the number of vehicles on the road, than to
extend the subway system (which works quite well for the areas it
covers, but which lacks coverage outside a few main traffic corridors).
Not only is this a pragmatic economic decision, it reflects an understanding of human culture as well. As I have said so often, we do what we must, then we do what’s easy, then we do what’s fun.
Riding the rails is, for many, none of these three things. Trying to
make rail transportation easier (more, faster routes) and more fun
(more amenities and comfort) generally entails making it more
expensive, and it’s risky –
there’s no guarantee people will change their established, private
commuting behaviour no matter how easy and fun it is, if driving is
considered easier and more fun. To make it work, it has to be compulsory – the only
way from point A to B – and for most politicians making it compulsory
is political suicide. Even expropriating lanes from existing
expressways as HOV lanes raises howls of protest from drivers who claim
they cannot carpool and hence get nothing in return for a slower
commute.
In his book Heat,
George Monbiot argues that airplane travel, the most environmentally
destructive form of travel by any measure, cannot be made less damaging
and must simply be prohibited or rationed. He also calls for fast,
frequent, comfortable buses with many amenities (i.e. easy and fun)
using HOV lanes to be added to connect the outermost subway/rail
stations in cities with those cities’ major suburban and exurban hubs.
That idea makes sense, but probably only if the alternative of driving
along these routes is either prohibited or made prohibitively slow or
prohibitively expensive.
What he’s talking about is what Dave
Snowden calls ‘attractors’ and ‘barriers’ in complex systems –
mechanisms and interventions that positively (attractors) or negatively
(barriers) affect human behaviours. My argument is that attractors that
make things easy and fun are rarely enough – you also need barriers
that make the behaviours you want to discourage impossible
(not just difficult or socially unacceptable). That’s the cynic in me,
but I’d love to hear some examples to disprove this (North American
examples, please: Europeans have been known to do things that are easy
and fun even when this involves changing behaviour voluntarily; North
Americans, not so much).
So we can, and should, institute
big-time taxes (barriers) on ‘bads’ (consumption of gasoline, gouging
up roads with 18-wheelers, driving in areas well-served by public
transport) and use the proceeds to provide subsidies (attractors) for
‘goods’ (clean, renewable energy and energy-efficient transportation).
We should stop allowing transportation costs as a tax-deductible
expense (barrier). We should stop building new expressways for cars
(barrier). We should make public transportation more convenient,
faster, more productive, more efficient and more reliable (attractors).
We should institute Monbiot’s luxury peripheries-out public
transportation systems, with gourmet restaurants and wifi onboard, and
perhaps even shopping malls on rails (attractor).
But,
especially for the rich and those reimbursed for extravagance by their
employer, none of this will be enough. In fact, by literally driving
the poor and self-employed off the roads, these steps will actually
make the expressways faster and more convenient for the die-hards and
encourage others to join them (a phenomenon Monbiot calls the ‘rebound
effect’).
Since above all else we do what we must, what is needed are barriers that make extravagance impossible, while at the same time
providing attractors to encourage others to support the new barriers.
For example, if we were to dig up roads and parking lots and replace
them with gardens, parks and community centres, the outraged commuters
would face not only the courageous politicians but also the fans of
these new pedestrian amenities. Skeptics might call this a ‘divide and
conquer’ strategy but I think it could work.
What other
barrier-attractor one-two combinations can you think of, that would
make driving (and flying) virtually impossible while simultaneously
creating a new delight? For example, organizations can already get a
win-win by allowing their employees to telecommute (more productivity,
lower office costs) but this is not enough to encourage a lot of
organizations (especially those in government services) to go this
route, even with videoconferencing now being virtually free. What could
we do that would make commuting long distances so onerous as to be
impossible, while at the same time
making telecommuting even more attractive to both employer and
employee? And what could we do to make ‘buying local’ a more delightful
experience, while making driving to box malls even more excruciating
than it already is? The answers need to be simple and inexpensive as
well as barriers and attractors in one.
Imagine this, and let me know what you come up with. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
