The bad side of technology: Railway

Automotive = BAD

Currently it seems that a car, is the ‘bad guy’ in the environmental sphere. Anytime effort or plans to reduce CO2 emission (COE) is put forward, the imperative is always to reduce car usage, among others. Success stories are often also shared where parking places or highways are being turned into public areas or high streets, and the cars that used to travel or park on them are shunned away. Cities that manage to reduce car usage is touted as success cases.

And they are not wrong. Anecdotally Amsterdam for example has fresher air compared to say, Birmingham. The same can be said of Zurich. Both of the cities have low percentage of car usage, and public transport plays a vital role. And in most cases when cars are removed from the picture, rail is generally touted as replacement for cars. At least those are the cases with my experience, since I interact with people in the rail industry who are of course bias towards it.

But what happens in the future, when cars are replaced and rails are the sole contributor to transportation. Would it be than rail becomes the new villain?

Imagine however in 50 years, people would say that Rail contributed to health problem from the iron dust between Rail and Wheel. Imagine they would say the high switching frequency from power electronics have been generating invisible rays that have been impacting gestations?

Those are some wild hyperboles but if we look back at the early days of cars, there were never the concern that cars would be everywhere, so much so that people would be stuck in one. In the early days, the concern was the speed and 20 mph was more than enough (80mph was considered to be fast enough to travel back in time) and no one imagined that the roads would be as congested as today. The fumes, were then considered annoyances and something to be expected of, much like smoke when you lit the fireplace.

Even in the city that I mentioned earlier, their successes seemed to be bringing problems; Amsterdam has too much bike that they had to build integrated bike park at main stations, Zurich has ‘too much’ trams and bus lines that traffic jams at peak hours are mainly due to these public transportation modes. It may be then in the future, after the pitchforks are finished with demanding the death of cars, rails might then be the next villain.

What is the solution?

It may be a bit disappointing after reading all this ramblings that my answer is there is no permanent solution. A solution is as great as it is at relieving the direness of a certain problem, and this changes as the solution itself might then be a problem next. I guess that is the purpose of technology, finding the next solution and in a way, creating the next problem(s).

Until next time, thank you for reading.