I want all of those advocating for rail travel to replace interstates and air travel here in the United States to keep a close eye on what is happening in Great Britain this week.
Rail is the primary means of inter-city travel in the UK. Unlike the US, where commuter flights are common and major cities are connected by a large interstate system, Britons rely on National Rail to get from London to Manchester or Liverpool and even up to Scotland and Wales. It’s a conglomeration of several railroad companies that operate trains throughout the island with contracts through the British government. Usually, it’s a fairly efficient and effective system that runs at high capacities, with trains added for special events or big soccer matches in certain places throughout the year.
But this week, the trains upon which so many Britons rely will not be available. The union workers of National Rail are going on strike because pay raises offered by the companies do not match the high rate of inflation in the country. A very limited schedule of trains will operate with non-union employees–but tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people are going to be stuck–during the height of the summer travel season. And to make matters worse, as a show of “solidarity”, union workers for the London Underground are going on strike too, meaning far fewer trains will be operating in The Tube as well.
Jumping into the car and getting where you need to go isn’t as simple over there as it is here. Just 77% of Britons own a personal vehicle–compared to 92% car ownership for Americans. The motorway system, while close to the quality and capacity of the US Interstate system, is entirely tollroad, and the infrastructure in most towns and cities in the UK is not car-friendly. In an effort to discourage personal transportation, London has “congestion charging”, where drivers pay a higher toll to enter the central part of the city and a LOT of money to park their vehicles there as well. Oh, and gas is $2.22 a liter–or $8.39 a gallon. And then there are the roundabouts.
Regional air carriers are still a possibility, but the British airlines are facing the same issues as those here in the US: not enough pilots and not enough ground personnel to maintain pre-pandemic flight schedules, much less add extra flights to serve those now without train service.
Transit strikes are rare but just as disruptive here in the US. New York has had a couple of doozies since the 1960’s. You can find the pictures of thousands of people walking over the bridges into Manhattan on the internet. Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco have all seen buses and subways shut down for a couple of weeks at a time. Los Angeles had a transit strike in 2000 that lasted for a month. But our car-first transportation system provided residents with other safe, and effective transportation options.
But because the UK–and much of Europe–have put so many of their eggs in the mass transit basket, a strike like this has become a national emergency, Therefore, there is tremendous pressure on already-embattled Prime Minister Boris Johnson to “do something” to fix the situation. But the union knows that Johnson’s grasp on power is tenuous. There are a couple of seats in Parliament up for special election this week, and Johnson’s Conservative Party is at risk of losing them. So it is highly unlikely that they are going to capitulate to his demands–and this strike will likely drag on for some time.
And therein lies the cautionary lesson for us Americans: the Government can certainly giveth, but the Government can also certainly taketh away. And that kind of dependence makes you beholden to those that control the purse strings and the access points. There’s a myth that when sociologists and historians started asking Italians in the years after World War II why they supported the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in his brazen rise to power, the people often replied “At least he made the trains run on time”.
