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News :: Miscellaneous |
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You Can't Smell the Flowers at 30,000 Feet |
Current rating: 0 |
by Brandon Keim
(No verified email address) |
05 Jul 2002
Modified: 11:19:11 PM |
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Traveling upon an airplane, it as if nothing existed between the points of departure and arrival. Everything beneath is bypassed. This is an unconscious reflection of that basic intention of modern consumerism: the reduction of distance by making all places the same. Planes remove us from the world, hiding both the beauty and ugliness of reality. On a train, one at least glimpses the world outside: the homes, the people, the land. |
Amtrak's unexpected predictions of bankruptcy and shutdown late last month produced quite a bit of coverage in the press, but only a desultory debate in Washington, where the administration offered a band-aid solution that will just briefly postpone the serious consideration our nation's troubled passenger railroad requires.
In exchange for $100 million needed to keep them functioning through mid-August, Amtrak agreed to cut $100 million from next year's budget and undertake a variety of management reforms. Amtrak also asked for another $100 million to $170 million to stay afloat through October 1, when the new fiscal year begins. However, Congress insists that the second payment be made in the form of a loan, instead of the appropriation Amtrak wants; meanwhile, the White House has said that next year's Amtrak budget would be only $521 million, less than half of the $1.2 billion Amtrak requires.
The Amtrak situation is obviously far from resolved, and will be one of the first issues considered when Congress returns from its Fourth of July recess. We can expect a repeat of the June debates. Amtrak's detractors will criticize its unprofitability and history of mismanagement, and renew their demands for its gutting and eventual privatization. Amtrak's supporters will argue that privatizing passenger rail has been disastrous elsewhere, especially in Britain, and that public transportation is inherently unprofitable.
Supporters will also point to the enormous federal subsidies given to highways and the notoriously insoluble airline industry. America's highways and roads received $32 billion last year, more than Amtrak has received in its thirty-one year existence; the airlines receive some $13 billion each year. While Amtrak lost $1.1 billion in 2001, United Airlines alone lost nearly twice that -- an amount that cannot be explained merely by invoking September 11, and makes it difficult to countenance their recent application for $2 billion in federal loan guarantees. Amtrak's defenders will also cite the relative environmental friendliness of passenger rail. Trains burn fewer fossil fuels than airplanes, and tend to be located in city centers rather than outskirts, helping to diminish urban sprawl.
However, conspicuously absent from all sides of the June debate was any sense of the actual experience of rail travel. When Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta said that for the $350 the government spends to send someone by rail from New Orleans to Los Angeles, they could just as easily be sent on a plane, nobody told him that he was missing the point altogether. Traveling by train is a unique and valuable experience, in itself worth saving.
Air travel is, first and foremost, profoundly antisocial. On a plane, one hopes simply not to be bothered, and usually spends the voyage in a coccoon of silence and in-flight movies. Humanity's ancient dream of flight is reduced to long hours strapped uncomfortably in a metal cylinder, eating food that tastes like styrofoam and breathing recycled air, windows pulled shut to block the sun and facilitate the broadcast forgettable Hollywood pap.
On a train, however, one moves about, meets people, shares stories. I think back to a trip I took a few years ago, from Boston to Chicago and then to San Francisco. On the first leg of the journey, the woman beside me was on her way to find a man she'd met on a dating hotline and hoped to marry, sight unseen. As we passed through Ohio I had breakfast with an Irish exchange student, and during the stopover in Chicago was taken to lunch by a community college teacher from Albuquerque. I made a bet -- which I eventually lost -- on the Y2K bug with an overblown Texas businessman, and had drinks with an old Hawaiian who traveled the world twelve months a year visiting properties he'd acquired with a fortune begun as a teenage auto-factory worker. In the lounge car we helped an errant Boy Scout escape the wrath of his scoutmaster. I met a Vietnam veteran who claimed to have put himself through law school in order to prosecute the unsolved murder of his wife, and began a friendship with a young woman from rural New Mexico that I treasure to this day.
Traveling upon an airplane, it as if nothing existed between the points of departure and arrival. Everything beneath is bypassed. This is an unconscious reflection of that basic intention of modern consumerism: the reduction of distance by making all places the same. Planes remove us from the world, hiding both the beauty and ugliness of reality. On a train, one at least glimpses the world outside: the homes, the people, the land. On my trip I witnessed the deadening sprawl of the Eastern seaboard, the industrial graveyards that now stand deserted like the playgrounds of a race of giants. I awoke to midwestern fields as flat and endless as the ocean, with roads as straight as a beam of light disappearing on the horizon. I saw the snowcapped Rockies rise from the great plains, the red rocks of the Southwest at sunset, and the lushness of northern California spreading from the foot of the Sierras. At night I saw homes flash by as rectangles of cozy light in an infinite darkness, and fell asleep to the lullaby rhythym of the rails. For all that airplanes are a symbol of modern America, trains are far more fundamentally American.
Before the recession, America's economic boom was proclaimed as a new age of abundant time, luxury, and ease. This turned out to be a lie: the increased efficiency brought on by advances in technology and managment resulted in heavier workloads and longer hours. The market prevailed over all; 24/7/365 became part of the lexicon, and personal life was subjugated to imperatives of growth and profit. Passenger trains are a visible refutation of this, and perhaps that is the reason Amtrak is regarded so distastefully in Washington.
Certainly there are many improvements Amtrak should make in equipment and service and management -- but these require not less federal funding, but more, and for this to happen our legislators must acknowledge that the quality of a journey is not always measured by its speed. Faster is not necessarily better. In these unsettled times, trains are a reminder that sometimes we ought to slow down.
Brandon Keim is a freelance writer and designer, soon to be Editor of GeneWatch. |
See also:
http://www.commondreams.org/
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