Why India must prioritize Railways over Road transport

As compared to other means of transportation, railways must never be thought of as things of the past. When railways are modernized, they become the indispensable means of transportation.

– Sogo Shinji, the father of Shinkansen, 1956

Roads should be used only where rail is found to be less cost-effective. It is imperative to treat the railways as the prime mover of the economy, even if that means diverting investment from roads to rail.

– Kamlesh Kumar, former ­additional director general, ministry of road transport and highways, 2014

1) Fuel: Railways can be run profitably using domestically produced electricity unlike cars, motorbikes etc which require us to fork over enormous amounts of money to import oil from states like Saudi which then turn around and finance our doom (“the infidels will supply us with the rope with which we shall hang them” – they can say now). Unlike electric cars or scooters which need constant subsidies from the taxpayers and merely shift our dependence to PRC & Chile for Lithium or the war torn Democratic Republic of Congo for cobalt, trains can run on power generated using hydro or coal and do so without subsidies when properly managed as is the case in Japan.

The US blessed by abundant sources of oil was still not immune to blackmail by the Gulf states during the 1970’s oil shocks. Ever since then, the country’s dependence on foreign oil has been regarded as a national security issue and various efforts have been made to reduce oil consumption. However, the country is built around the automobile and this is a key reason for its continued dependence on foreign oil according to authors such as Vaclav Smil. The same point has also been made by conservative authors William S. Lind and Paul M. Weyrich in their paper “A Conservative Proposal for Energy Independence” where they promote railways over roads due to reasons of national security.

According to Peter Drucker’s article “Behind Japan’s Success” from 1981, the following was MITI’s stand on automobiles and roads:

MITI has also believed, quite sincerely, that expansion of the automobile industry would have an adverse, indeed a deleterious, effect on Japan’s balance of trade, on her ability to earn her way in the world economy, and on her productivity generally. The more successful the Japanese automobile industry, MITI has argued, the worse the economic impact on Japan. The automobile, it has pointed out, requires the two raw materials that are in shortest supply in Japan: petroleum and iron ore. It also requires the diversion of scarce resources, both food-growing land and capital, to highways and highway construction. Instead of an automobile industry, what MITI has wanted is massive investment to upgrade the railroads’ freight-handling capacity.

Note the point about freight rail, and it is in this regard that the partly JICA funded dedicated freight corridor in India is very important as it will separate out slow moving freight from passenger rail while decreasing our oil imports.

In wartime, oil becomes the most vital commodity and the allies cutting off all oil was a key reason why Japan decided to attack the USA. A key reason for allied victory in both world wars was the abundant oil supplies which the USA possessed & Germany lacked. Instead of conserving and storing oil, we are frittering it away on frivolities such as cars/motorbikes while we hardly have any domestic oil reserves to speak of.

2) Coverage: Anyone of reasonable age can ride a train/mass transit but private vehicles exclude those who cannot drive. Some of these demographics include those below 18, the disabled and senior citizens. The US is the most car centric major nation and as a result, you find strange phenomena such as 15 year olds being driven everywhere by their parents because there are no alternatives available. At the other extreme, you have Japan where 98% of public school kids either walk or cycle to school. One only needs to compare the vision conjured up by this 1950’s Ford car commercial to the reality of Japan today to realize what is the correct choice for India.

3) Land: Railways require less land than major roads and that is visible even to the naked eye of an onlooker. This is especially important in the old world where many countries including India have dense populations and agricultural land is of great value. In the US, by contrast, there remain vast stretches of untamed wilderness and empty land, hence that country can afford to take a lackadaisical and wasteful attitude towards land but can we?

According to Lee Kuan Yew the founding father of modern Singapore:

We cannot have everybody own a car, however high our per capita income may be: our young must accept the fact that we cannot afford to have our roads jammed up and that this will harm our economy. We cannot give everybody landed property, a terrace house or bungalow. We do not have the land for it. But we can provide everybody with high-rise and high-quality homes, and high-quality public transport.

He came to this conclusion after he found that no matter how many flyovers he built or how wide he made the roads, they would all soon be filled up thanks to the phenomenon of induced demand.

And the above is just in regards to the roads where as roads are only a part of the space vehicles occupy. We also have to consider the enormous amounts of land dedicated to “free” (i.e. socialized) parking and the perverse effects of minimum parking laws. A quick summary can be found in this video.

Just think about the fact that many people are more concerned about “free” storage spaces for their cars while there are people out there homeless in places such as San Francisco due to lack of affordable housing!

4) Safety: Trains run on dedicated tracks separate from other traffic and as such are remarkably safe compared to vehicular travel. They are one of the reasons why a vast city such as Tokyo has so few traffic related deaths and injuries. The Shinkansen is estimated to have prevented thousands of deaths and injuries by eliminating the trips that would have taken place by road. According to the government’s own stats in 2016, there were reported to be 4,73,050 road accidents, 4,85,508 injuries, & 1,51,801 deaths on Indian roads.

How many of these people would still be alive & have all their limbs intact if they had viable alternatives to driving?

For comparison, in 2017 the number of traffic deaths in Japan was only 3,694. In other words, India had almost 41 times as many dead despite our population only being around 10 times as much as Japan’s while also having far fewer elderly drivers (responsible for many fatalities in Japan) and a far lower per capita car ownership.

I leave it up to the readers on whether this is the road we should continue to take in the future.

5) Physical activity: This might seem strange, what exactly do trains have to do with physical activity and health?

Trains and mass transit do not come to your doorstep and instead force you to reach them and people often do this by walking or cycling to the station. In countries with extensive transit such as Japan (in Tokyo, a train station is usually within a 15 min walk no matter where you are in the city), walking is thus built into everyday life and it is not something for which you have to drive to a paid gym to walk on a treadmill.

In 2002, the average Japanese person 15 years and above walked 3 ¾ miles daily (7,241 steps) vs. 5608 steps by Americans and that undoubtedly also plays a role in the very low obesity rates found in Japan.

6) Pollution: Trains consume a lot less energy. Also, the friction generated by wheels on rail is a lot less compared to the friction generated by rubber on asphalt. Road dust is also a serious concern in India which still has quite a few unpaved roads. Road travel is also connected with particulate emissions by tires, and horrendous noise pollution (especially with the constant honking in India). The smoke generated by vehicles is a major reason why Indian cities are unlivable, but instead of dealing with this problem, kids who burst Diwali crackers once a year have been made the scapegoats.

7) Productivity: Traveling by train allows you to read, get work done etc., all of which would be impossible when driving. Even if one were forced to stand, it is not an obstacle to reading in this age of smartphones. When people ask me on twitter where I get the time to read so much, I give the answer that I don’t have a television or a car at home. If you don’t believe me, give it a try & calculate the time you spend on your vehicle more accurately (i.e. by including petrol bunk stoppages, repair/maintenance visits, driver’s license renewal etc).

8) Community life: Train stations can serve as hubs of community life with shopping, daycare, and a myriad other services as in Japan. By contrast roads, when they are dominated by vehicles, push out pedestrians, and the streets merely become a means for vehicle owners to rush through. We often hear of demolitions of centuries old temples for road expansion and what no one seems to question is how the same temple was no problem a few decades before the explosion of vehicles on our streets.

Consider too what has happened to the sight of kids walking to school or playing in the streets which used to be a much more common sight just a few decades back. Today few parents dare to let them do so thanks to the incessant traffic and reckless drivers. Yet one finds this to be a common sight in Japan with its narrow streets where pedestrians rule and Japan’s per capita income nearly 20X India’s. As several western observers noted, “Japanese cities are defiantly anti-modern and anti-rational”. In fact, there is little causal relation between owning vehicles and being a “developed” country. The Japanese road system was quiet underdeveloped well into the 1980s compared to Europe and USA but their per capita income had already caught up with the West. Even today most Japanese highways tend to be heavily tolled and only consist of two lanes in each direction with lanes being narrower than western highway lanes.

Those interested in the connection between traffic and the death of community life can look up the extensive research of Donald Appleyard on this topic.

9) Wildlife: Today we see a lot of lip service being paid to wildlife protection and how Dharma teaches us to live in harmony with nature. Yet many of the same people who utter these words have nothing to say on 10 or 12 lane highways being driven through the countryside by cutting down thousands of trees and the daily road kill carnage of wildlife. It is no one’s case that railway tracks leave the land pristine & untouched or that wildlife isn’t killed by trains. Everyone hears about the tragic killings of elephants by trains through the news. But in comparative perspective roads do far more damage to wildlife as they require the destruction of a lot more trees & individual vehicles kill & maim smaller wildlife by the millions. By prioritizing railways we will be practising Dharma beyond lip service because we will be minimizing the damage we do to wildlife.

10) National security infrastructure: Railways are not as useful or crucial as they once were during the war due to the development of airpower but they can still play an important role in upholding the internal security of the nation state. The military in PRC has conducted HSR test runs with soldiers fully loaded in their combat gear to Xinjiang to see railways performance. The objective is to rapidly deploy troops to put down any future Dungan jihad. They already used trains to rapidly deploy troops to crush the Tibetan uprising in 2008.

As a nation facing multiple insurgencies, it is important that we prepare to deal with what circumstances will throw at us in the future.

These are just some of the reasons on why rail transport should be prioritized and we have not even touched on personal financial benefits (just calculate what % of the income you are forced to spend on your vehicle including fuel costs, repair and maintenance).

At a moment when economically advanced countries (e.g. Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, France, Spain) are questioning their past transport choices and reorienting towards more sustainable transport, let us not repeat their mistakes for as the ancient Greek historian Polybius says in his “Histories”:

For there are two ways by which all men can reform themselves, the one through their own mischances, the other through those of others, and of these the former is the more impressive, but the latter less hurtful. Therefore we should never choose the first method if we can help it, as it corrects by means of great pain and peril, but ever pursue the other, since by it we can discern what is best without suffering hurt. Reflecting on this we should regard as the best discipline for actual life the experience that accrues from serious history; for this alone makes us, without inflicting any harm on us, the most competent judges of what is best at every time and in every circumstance.

Additional reading:

Japanese Urban Planning