Peter EspeutI AM picking up signals that the Jamaican passenger railway service is now finally dead. On a talk show last week, powerful 'kitchen cabinet' member, Kingsley Thomas, said and I paraphrase that he had studied the railway and found it too expensive for Jamaica. What we needed, he said, was high-speed rail like in Europe or Japan, and since we couldn't afford high-speed rail, he implied, we would have no passenger rail at all.
Yet the same Kingsley Thomas just three months ago made public the early drawings for the 'New Town' in Clarendon with a rail station; and Prime Minister Patterson announ-ced that the revival of an airport at Vernamfield would contain rail links. But maybe both these were freight trains, carrying cargo from the Industrial Park at the 'New Town' to be exported by air. The new bus terminal in downtown Kingston which is now in advanced planning, will be built you guessed it on the site of the Kingston Railway Station, which will be demolished. That is sort of final, don't you think?
CATCHING UP YEARS LATER
I saw the handwriting on the wall when it became known that the contract to operate Highway 2000 included a clause that if Jamaica's railway system is expanded, the highway concessionaire is due compensation. What the Government did was to invest in highways at the expense of the railway. With Highway 2000 the Government created a disincentive a deterrent to restarting the railway. The French company operating the toll road knows the values of trains the serious competition an efficient rail service will bring; they knew what they were doing when they insisted on that clause. The question is whether the Government knew what it was doing.
We seem to catch up with international trends about 20 or 30 years too late. The process of crisscrossing the USA with four and six lane highways began in the 1950s to accommodate the motor car then in its ascendancy. When I first visited Los Angeles, I was surprised to discover that they had no bus or subway train system; LA was designed and built with the private motor car in mind. Some years ago I got caught in Miami at night because I didn't know that the buses stopped running at 6:00 PM; there it was assumed that at night, people will get around by car.
AGE OF MASS TRANSIT
The world has changed; the age of the motor car has peaked and we have moved into the age of mass transit. Los Angeles now has a subway system and the buses in Miami run late into the night. The fact is that the operation of the motor car is dependent on cheap petroleum, a commodity about which the geopolitical prognosis is poor. In case the supply of oil is ever truncated, good substitutes for all the many uses of petroleum products and by-products have been found except for one: motor car fuel. Nowadays as oil prices soar, it is clearer that dependence on imported oil is a poor strategy, and the creation of a transportation system which depends on large volumes of petroleum products is poor and irresponsible planning.
Manila has built an overhead railway to transport masses of people across the city quickly and cheaply, while keeping cars off the roads. All over the world, public policy is shifting towards better and more comfortable mass transit. Kingsley Thomas is wrong about France depending on high-speed trains. France has the TGV, but only on a few routes. The rail system of Europe is based on the same type of train service we had. Besides, to have high-speed trains you have to have relatively long stretches of straight track, not possible in mountainous Jamaica.
UNBEARABLE LEVELS
Depending on motor cars had a heavy price: the 20th century was the age of the motor car and of the onset of global warming, the impacts of which we Jamaicans feel in extreme and anomalous weather conditions like late-season hurricanes, and slow but steady sea level rise. It seems that the Jamaican Government has consciously decided to base our transportation system on the gas-guzzling motor car and motor truck. Current government policy has increased the numbers of private motor cars and trucks on our roads to unbearable levels (for some people), and has committed our nation's scarce resources to four-lane highways (Highway 2000, the North Coast Highway) and to an ever-increasing oil import bill.
Moving people and freight by train is far more fuel-efficient and cheaper than any other means, except ship; trains reduce traffic jams, stress on our roads, and air pollution. Instead of borrowing money to build superhighways, we would have been much better off borrowing to build a modern rail transport system in Jamaica, including overhead rapid transit in the capital city. The fact that oil-rich Kuwait and auto mega-manufacturer Japan has lent us these large sums to promote highways over the railway must not be ignored. In Jamaica, colour and class considerations dominate our decision-making about everything, including education and public transportation. The fact is that certain people in Jamaica don't want to mix too closely with certain other people, which would happen in really integrated high schools and in a good public transportation system. In other countries, executives park their luxury cars and ride to work on the train, along with their middle-managers and labourers. In Jamaica our deep-seated class system will not allow the middle class to take public transportation, and so we have opted for the segregation of our antiseptic private cars.
Commercial trains were running in Jamaica less than twenty years after they began in England. For decades farmers moved their produce to market and children went to school by train. Many tons of bananas reached bruise-free to Port Antonio by rail (which ran right onto the pier), and Highgate had two train stations: one for passengers and one for bananas. In Kingston, the transfer of imports was facilitated by Railway Piers 1, 2 and 3. Forward planning contained reservations for the railway in Newport West, as well as the planned township of Portmore. All of that has now come to nought.
The Government shut down the railway on the grounds that it was losing money. That could have been only by design, as the fares were ridiculously cheap underpriced and it seems that no effort was made to save it. Its death was a policy decision to favour the politically powerful trucking lobby. The bauxite companies know the value of rail transport, for they have wisely not followed the Government's footsteps. It seems that our beloved country is not to be spared unsustainable 'development', and that we will perish from being led by the short-sighted and unperceptive.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and is executive director of an environment and development NGO.
