It's Time for Trains
While living in Stockholm a few years back, I didn’t have a car. And I didn’t need one. The trains in Sweden run like clockwork, and you can travel both locally within a city and out to the country. All you need to do is find a local train station, pay the fare, and possibly switch to another train or two along the way.
In the United States, we built our infrastructure around the automobile. We made it exceptionally convenient to purchase a car (you can get a loan!), park your car (either at your house, along every road, or we will make big parking lots just for cars), and to refuel your car (a gas station on every corner). What we didn’t think through was the long term cost to our society, and whether designing around automobiles was the best option.
Because cars are so ubiquitous in the U.S., we are failing to walk or bike to our destinations, and there is a very real cost to this inactivity. According to the Centers for Disease Control, over forty percent of Americans are obese. The medical cost to our society alone from obesity was $173 billion in 2019. You are also likely to retain your ability to balance and your coordination longer in life if you frequently walk to a train station to catch a local train.
Using trains is better for our environment. The greenhouse effect from gas emissions from railway transport is 80% less than cars. One line of track can carry 10’s of thousands of people per hour, while a similar freeway can carry only a few thousand.
The frustration from driving a car doesn’t exist on a train. When commuting to work in an automobile, I often find myself stressed out, mad at other drivers, and often sit in a traffic jam burning gas and moving nowhere. Instead, traveling by train can be productive. You can read, watch a show on your phone or tablet, or pay attention to others and engage in active conversations. There are no traffic jams, and you don’t have to worry about taking the wrong exit.
Although there is a cost to taking trains, there is no need to purchase car insurance. Or pay to have your oil changed. Or tires rotated. Or even for a car wash. After 7-8 years, you don’t have to shop for a new train to replace the one you currently use. There is no sales tax either, because you don’t need to get rid of your current train. And your home has more free space because you can let others use your train when you are not using it. It’s only there when you need it.
Trains have some drawbacks as well, but the positive attributes greatly outweigh the negative ones. So the next time you get into your box of metal only to drive 10 minutes across the city and then park in a lot that could have been a park where children could play, stop and ask yourself whether our reliance on automobiles was the right course of action. Because if we had an undeveloped country to do over again, I think we could make a much better choice. I know I would.