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I was talking to a friend yesterday about a book I had just read, How the Railways Will Fix the Future. She had recommended it to me because she knew I was a transit advocate, and besides that very much still my 5 year-old self with respect to thinking how cool trains are. It was a fairly quick read; the author (a former? railway engineer) does a good job of breaking down the technical aspects into easy to understand language, and the his engineering background allows him to make some interesting insights into transit that you don't get from your typical urbanism enthusiast.
Where the book utterly failed was in its persuasion. The author is so utterly trapped in his ideological bubble that he is either expecting no one who doesn't already agree with him to read it, or that no one actually disagrees with him (or if they do, are merely pretending to). Here's a tip for all you prospective authors: if you are trying to advocate for something, don't start by furiously denouncing the origins and history of what you want to advocate for. Spending the first 20 pages going over the problematic beginnings of railways as a tool of capitalism and facilitator of imperial conquest and colonization of indigenous peoples, funded by the capital created by the transatlantic slave trade, only to tepidly conclude that despite this legacy the idea can be rescued to create a more equitable future... what? Imagine going about your life like this. Is this man capable of saying he enjoys a good sandwich without first clarifying that he unambiguously denounces the legacy of bread as a staple ration for armies of conquest?
There were various other weak elements; it should go without saying around here that claiming the US needs to build more transit to help LGBTQ+ people of low incomes move states is an argument worthy of only a wanking motion, but beyond that shackling your arguments to such narrow slivers of the population when you're arguing for a universal good is just moronic. And he does the classic leftist tactic of insisting upon "democratizing" progresses by increasing public involvement and decentralizing decision-making, assuming of course that everyone shares his incredible niche politics. (The kicker is he had spent a good chunk of the previous segment going into the exploding costs of High Speed 2, maybe one of the better arguments ever against these notions) Just again and again the arguments came off as so staggeringly lacking self-awareness. But then again I looked up a few reviews for it and those were generally positive; essentially all coming from other left-leaning urbanist progressives who share very similar politics.
But it frustrates me endlessly as someone who actually wants to get these projects built is that ostensibly their biggest supporters are just so fucking bad at making the case for them. So somehow it ends up (at least in Ontario where I live) that it's only the conservatives who end up getting new infrastructure projects done.
Presumably the author wrongly expected that these sorts of counterarguments were the main objections that he had to advocate against? So obviously you start with what you believe the opposition to believe already, and then you refute it.
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In Astralcodexten book review contests there was missing a good savage panning of a book.
What is his argument that this will help rail? I have the stereotype of projects being derailed (ha!) by decentralized and increased public involvement.
His argument in brief is that populations should have control over the services that effect them: so suburban services for a given city should be controlled by the local government, even though his ideal model sees a national, public-owned company owning the rail infrastructure, the rolling stock, hiring the employees, running the trains etc. So ownership should be centralised: planning and operation devolved. He sees this going hand in hand with extensive public consultation: not just at the planning phase but before that, starting at the proposal phase. He thinks (rather axiomatically) that direct education and involvement of the public of the benefits of a given infrastructure project will naturally engender far-reaching support for that project. The only hurdle he thinks that should be removed is any pondering of fiscal sense:
I think there is some merit to the notion of decentralisation; I think a decent chunk of the cost problems associated with modern transit construction, particularly in the Anglosphere, is the imbalance of revenue generation between municipal and higher levels of government that result in transit projects largely being designed by cities but paid for by higher levels of government; it invites buffet-style planning on the one end and political interference on the other. But I think in general his approach is just naïve beyond belief; the combination of the assumption that local interests will only work in everyone's best interests and abandoning any pretense of fiscal restraint obviously invites endless waste and graft.
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