by Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region
Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape by John R. Stilgoe, University of Virginia Press, 2008
Imagine a time in some not-so-distant future when the highways we now drive on lie vacant and abandoned. It's hard to, isn't it? We, at least as a nation, so completely rely on the automobile that it is difficult to see a day when these wide strips of asphalt will not be needed as much.
Quite the same situation existed a century ago, even a half century ago, with train lines. Thousands of miles of train routes crisscrossed the nation, and imagining a time when more than half of these would lie abandoned would have been simply inconceivable. Yet here we are.
Harvard professor John R. Stilgoe, in his wonderful, beautifully written, fact-drenched book "Train Time," forecasts a future in which, to exaggerate Stilgoe's thesis a bit, these stories flip. Stilgoe, a self-titled "landscape historian" whose "Metropolitan Corridors" is a classic, uses his deep knowledge of train lines past as a knowledge base from which to predict a resurgence of train use for both freight and passengers.
Stilgoe essentially sees a return to the status-quo anti, where congestion in both freight and passenger lines gradually forces both business and government to rediscover the treasure right under their noses: the thousand of miles of underused or abandoned lines that usually go right into the heart of a city.
Essentially, Stilgoe forecasts a train resurgence in every sector -- freight, commuters, inter-city and tourism.
Proof of sorts, Stilgoe says, is that crafty companies are already buying up land around still-abandoned train lines, waiting for a resurgence they see coming.
"Parking lots that once served long-demolished passenger and freight stations host lengthy visits by deep-pocked real estate developers who stare speculatively at adjacent stores and roads, spread old maps across automobile hoods, and make notes on laptop computers."
Leaving aside the point he is illustrating, this is a typical Stilgoe sentence in that it's incredibly well written. The whole book is like this. The famed newspaper editor Gene Roberts said in a talk I once attended that "Good writing makes you see." That's what Stilgoe's does, and it's the rare writer that does it consistently, and even rarer the academic.
To a large degree, the future Stilgoe predicts has already started. Even before the current rise in gas prices, statistics were showing a growing use of mass transit and flat lines of per-capita driving. Now it is actually declining. The question is only whether the trend will continue, and if so, at what grade of descent.
Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape by John R. Stilgoe, University of Virginia Press, 2008
Imagine a time in some not-so-distant future when the highways we now drive on lie vacant and abandoned. It's hard to, isn't it? We, at least as a nation, so completely rely on the automobile that it is difficult to see a day when these wide strips of asphalt will not be needed as much.
Quite the same situation existed a century ago, even a half century ago, with train lines. Thousands of miles of train routes crisscrossed the nation, and imagining a time when more than half of these would lie abandoned would have been simply inconceivable. Yet here we are.
Harvard professor John R. Stilgoe, in his wonderful, beautifully written, fact-drenched book "Train Time," forecasts a future in which, to exaggerate Stilgoe's thesis a bit, these stories flip. Stilgoe, a self-titled "landscape historian" whose "Metropolitan Corridors" is a classic, uses his deep knowledge of train lines past as a knowledge base from which to predict a resurgence of train use for both freight and passengers.
Stilgoe essentially sees a return to the status-quo anti, where congestion in both freight and passenger lines gradually forces both business and government to rediscover the treasure right under their noses: the thousand of miles of underused or abandoned lines that usually go right into the heart of a city.
Essentially, Stilgoe forecasts a train resurgence in every sector -- freight, commuters, inter-city and tourism.
Proof of sorts, Stilgoe says, is that crafty companies are already buying up land around still-abandoned train lines, waiting for a resurgence they see coming.
"Parking lots that once served long-demolished passenger and freight stations host lengthy visits by deep-pocked real estate developers who stare speculatively at adjacent stores and roads, spread old maps across automobile hoods, and make notes on laptop computers."
Leaving aside the point he is illustrating, this is a typical Stilgoe sentence in that it's incredibly well written. The whole book is like this. The famed newspaper editor Gene Roberts said in a talk I once attended that "Good writing makes you see." That's what Stilgoe's does, and it's the rare writer that does it consistently, and even rarer the academic.
To a large degree, the future Stilgoe predicts has already started. Even before the current rise in gas prices, statistics were showing a growing use of mass transit and flat lines of per-capita driving. Now it is actually declining. The question is only whether the trend will continue, and if so, at what grade of descent.
@RegionalPlan