A Visionary and The Undoing of Collectivism

 

1925 rail guide showing passenger service twice a day to towns I grew up around, only four of which are still towns. Only Fargo still has passenger rail service.

 I've become obsessed with the idea of transportation and urban design. As I wrote in an earlier post, I had spent a year at least commuting to work and back, primarily by car with some carpooling and bus riding. 

Back in college, I had a professor named Dr. Nielsen who was obsessed with trains. He famously didn't own a car, walked everywhere around the small, walkable college town of Mayville, and purportedly memorized train schedules. He would get a ride to the Amtrak station in Fargo or Grand Forks if he needed to travel. At the time, an able person who didn't drive, own a car, and was focused on what I saw as the transit of the past as much as he was about the rest of history seemed very eccentric and peculiar. Part of it may have been because of his poor eyesight and other factors, but that aside, he loved trains. Decades later, I see his conscious rebellion against car-centric culture as visionary.

A century ago, America arguably had the best transportation rail system in the world. I recently dug into some old rail schedules. In 1925, a person in the tiny town of Clifford could hop on a train going opposite directions twice daily. My grandfather, his brother, and two friends famously took the train to Chicago in 1934 for the World's Fair in Chicago. He likely made the trip more easily than I could do today in an age before great highways and roads. A rail culture meant at every step along the way that everything catered to a civilization that didn't depend on personal transport. I could take the train to Chicago today, but it would be more challenging since our whole national transport infrastructure, like everything else in our fractured nation, has shifted away from the collective toward individualism. In some ways, the roots of today's crisis of reality have a few seeds in the many choices we have made to tear the individual away from a collective community and place him inside a suburban home on a spread-out lot where he needs a big car to get anywhere. We threw it away to pursue the hyper-individualism that is destroying our communities and bankrupting our finances with an infrastructure of roads and suburban sprawl designed in opposition to collectivism.