Let's Hear It for Trains!

With the recent announcement by the Obama administration of a major new rail initiative, I'm reminded of another old post from my former blog, which I am pasting below. I hope that Canada will show similar boldness, though something tells me that we can expect nothing of the sort from this government.

Anyway, enjoy!

In the academic racket we aspire to international scholarly reputations, and with this comes the need to travel. Trips to national or international meetings to present invited lectures are common, as are various invited talks at other universities. Then there is the overseas junket, perhaps as a visiting scholar, or a plenary lecturer. All of these things need to appear on the CV, with frequency, if one is to make the case for eminence.

What all of these activities have in common is the use of air travel. Being in an older demographic, I can still remember a time when flying had a certain allure: it was not that commonly done, and the customer service allowed passengers to convince themselves that this was something truly special. Those days are long gone, replaced with the current pathetic rituals of travel--pointless security kabuki theatre, overpacked planes, arbitrary cancellation of flights, indifferent ticket and gate agents, identical terminal food franchises, etc. The horror of modern air travel acts as a disincentive to seeking the kind of international renown that demands its use. Then there is the environmental cost. Every flight of reasonable distance consumes a significant amount of each passenger's annual carbon footprint, if we were serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In the future, when (if) the recession recedes, demand for fossil fuels will rise, and production will not be able to keep pace. This is the long-predicted phenomenon of "peak oil," and the economics are clear: when there is no longer any slack between supply and demand, the price will rise steadily, even precipitously. The impact that this will have on air travel will be profound. It will simply no longer be a routine activity, because relatively few will be able to afford the cost of a ticket that is in any way pegged to the actual cost of the fuel.

As this unfolds, we will all have to reevaluate our rationales for travel, and our expectations for how that will be accomplished. One likely outcome is a resurgence in travel by rail. Back in the mid-20th century, it was still considered reasonable to expend several days to travel somewhere distant, and this was the case for those in academics as well. An invitation to speak at Yale and Dartmouth? Book it when you have time to take the train there and back. And people were forced to be more choosy about their trips; accepting every invitation would entail traveling 100% of the time.

A return to that slower-paced approach might not be so bad. As I contemplate it, I'm reminded of Ani DiFranco's poem "self evident," written in the days after 9/11. Here's an excerpt:

here's to our last drink of fossil fuels 
let us vow to get off of this sauce 
shoo away the swarms of commuter planes 
and find that train ticket we lost 
cuz once upon a time the line followed the river 
and peeked into all the backyards 
and the laundry was wavingthe graffiti was teasing usfrom brick walls and bridges 
we were rolling over ridges 
through valleys 
under stars i dream of touring like duke ellington 
in my own railroad car i dream of waiting on the tall blonde wooden benches 
in a grand station aglow with grace 
and then standing out on the platform 
and feeling the air on my face
--from "self evident" by Ani DiFranco

Sounds pretty good to me.