Continued...
The Transportationists: Garrison and Levinson

The Railroad and Its Lessons

The development of the railroad is a touchstone for much of the analysis in The Transportation Experience, because it, along with emerging maritime services, helped shape what the authors call the "mother logic" imprinted on other modes. In some ways, write the authors, other transportation modes or systems "are just railroads in other clothes. There is 'railroad think' ranging from the ways engineers superelevate highway curves, to government, firm, and union labor relations in the airline industry."

Understanding railroads, therefore, in terms of their invention, deployment and continued success today, is key to understanding the entire transportation system, Garrison and Levinson write. The authors trace the history of railroads' invention, development, growth and success from the first scheduled passenger and freight railroad, the Stockton & Darlington Railway, which began operation in 1825. Originally built to carry coal from Auckland in northeast England, it required "a considerable and risky investment in transportation."

At the time of the first successful rail line, conventional wisdom was that it was neither needed nor practical. Management of existing systems was the priority. A similar view is the conventional wisdom today.

The early experience of the Stockton & Darlington, write the authors, shows how revolutionary change occurs in transportation. Much of what it says is contrary to common wisdom, both today and at the time, when transportation was largely limited to tram, canal, maritime, and road systems. In contrast to today’s romanticized view of rail, contemporary observers during its early development expressed resistance and criticism of the intrusive new technology. (“An ugly dark monster of a tunnel [that] kept its jaws open…ravenous for more destruction,” is the way a Charles Dickens character described it.) Critics believed railroads were not needed or practical; managing existing systems was the priority. "A similar view is wisdom today," write the authors. "A fixed production set exists, let us manage it."

High-Speed Rail's Limited Promise

At the same time, the authors suggest that the passenger railroad is a dying technology, suitable for a select few settings, but extremely limited in its practical usefulness overall. They analyze the prospects for high-speed rail in the U.S. market and, contrary to some widely publicized views, conclude that it is not likely to succeed on its own merits. In the two places where high-speed rail has enjoyed some of its greatest success, Europe and Japan, other factors contributed to the outcome. Regulatory schemes artificially inflated airfares, so airlines could not compete for customers on price. And because Europe and Japan are more densely populated and have more severe congestion and capacity problems, high-speed rail has an easier time of matching the convenience of air, creating the high-volume, short-distance market for which high-speed rail is most suited.

Finally, they argue, high-speed rail is too late: "In mature systems, the benefits of new infrastructure in an already well-served area are elusive." Tinkering with an older system will yield only minimal gains. "Whether high-speed rail is a new story, or simply the final chapter to the history of conventional passenger rail, waits to be seen," they conclude.

At the same time, they credit rail with positively influencing other modes of transport: rural and intercity highways, urban highways, canals and rivers, maritime shipping, and aviation. "The railroads have taught us how to create, deploy, and manage big socio-technical systems," the authors write. But there are some lessons the non-rail modes failed to heed: Rather than retain early railroad designers’ commitment to building from a systems view that "turned on the situation and the tasks to be performed on the route, as well as the way the route was to perform within the network," latter-day non-rail modes are driven to achieve a uniformity of performance, a one-solution-fits-all approach. "'How big?' they say, “is about the only question raised and answered—how many highway lanes, the number of cars in light rail multiple units, and the sizes of school buses."