Suzanne Harrington: We need to make trains sexy again
We need to re-romanticise trains for the 21st century, making them efficient, swift, desirable.
My chap and I are in different places. Geographically I mean – this isn’t about couples counselling. He lives in the capital, I live on the coast, with sixty miles of rolling green countryside and sprawling city suburbs between us.
When we want to see each other, I get on a train to the city, or he gets in his car to the coast.
Maybe you can guess who arrives in a more relaxed head space.
The moment you get on a train, you exhale. You sit back, gazing out the window at the passing landscape, idly doing a crossword, sipping a coffee, or getting a ton of work done, uninterrupted, finishing a book, whatever.
Arriving refreshed. Unlike my fella, who spends at least double the time inching forward in urban gridlock, maybe navigating a crash on the motorway that’s caused miles of tailback, before getting a speeding ticket for overcompensating after all the delays. Arriving frazzled.
But we love our cars, because we have been programmed to love our cars.
Car ads are always filmed in remote places where there are no other cars, rather than in the reality of sitting in traffic, fuming in all kinds of ways. Nor do we perceive ourselves as traffic - traffic is something made by other people in other cars - while we view public transport as second best, something used by poor people.
Margaret Thatcher once said that anyone taking the bus after the age of 30 was a failure; lots of us still think like this.
But how we get from A to B is changing.
In our wisdom, we replaced trains with cars, which emit 80% more greenhouse gases per kilometre, and have made Dublin the third slowest driving city in the world (10km takes 28 minutes).
We built all those new roads instead of rebuilding and reinvesting in all our old train networks. Duh.
In 1920, Ireland’s rail network criss-crossed the country for 3,500km. You could get the train to mad places like Ballybunion, Ballybrophy, Ballyhaunis. (Nope, me neither).
Today the Irish rail network, once a sprawling delta, is a dried up trickle of its former self.
Great news then that the transport minister is keen to regenerate this network, to get us back on trains.
In order to get us out of our cars, trains need to be better than cars – faster, cheaper, more comfortable, and with better Wifi.
Creating a cultural shift is not an overnight thing, and requires considerable cash input, but the alternative – sitting in traffic as the planet goes up in smoke – seems a bit daft.
We need to re-romanticise trains for the 21st century, making them efficient, swift, desirable. A developed society, one going forward in every sense, is not when all the poor people have cars, but when all the rich people use public transport. We need to make trains sexy, cars unsexy.
