05 Jan 2010
When railway travel was new in the 19th century, novelists fantasized about murders taking place in wagon compartments separated from one another. Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, famously filmed with Albert Finney as the tireless Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of this sentiment: when people are entrapped in railway wagons for several days in a row, there is broad potential for intrigue and crime. Although the adventures of Hercule Poirot can be easily discarded as the outgrowth of Christie’s morbid imagination, there is an awful real-life counterpart to the death of mister Ratchett in her novel.
Recently published EU statistics tell a tragic truth of suicide on the rail. In the Netherlands two hundred individuals deliberately throw themselves in front of a train to put an end to their lives every year. This number is, sadly, the highest in Europe today. Among the most densely used and intricately branched rail traffic systems in the world, the Dutch railroads provide those wishing to commit suicide a good opportunity to do so effectively. I once happened to be in a train as it collided with a person – it is a horrendous experience one does not easily forget.
These gruesome figures open up a wider story of infrastructures and death. Early car races on the public road killed participants and spectators alike. The British press condemned a 1903 car race between Paris and Madrid as the ‘race to death’. “Europe horrified over fatalities in French speed contest” wrote the New York Times. Car races were subsequently banned to specialized circuits, but the death toll on the road has been steadily growing thereafter. Almost 40.000 people die on the road in the European Union (EU), contrasted to over 4.000 on rails (of which 60% are suicides). The death toll on the road peaked in the 1970s in several western European countries. A 1969 publication of the European Conference of Ministers of Transport even labeled it ‘the holocaust on the roads’. Improvement since then should not obscure the fact that an additional 1,7 million (!) people suffer injuries in road traffic in the EU, of whom 17% are considered seriously injured.
The history of infrastructure is thus written in blood – not only in the case of traffic, but also in the case of construction. Approximately two hundred workers died of accidents and disease constructing the St. Gotthard railway tunnel. The death toll for digging the Panama and Suez canals numbered in the thousands rather than the hundreds, with tropical diseases, landslides and other incidents all causing misery among the workers. Luckily such large numbers are now a thing of the past.
Infrastructures have provided many societal benefits that have made life as we know it more pleasant than it used to be. Increased mobility of goods has helped fight famine by making crops available from larger distances. From such perspectives infrastructures have helped saving many lives. At the same time, we should not turn a blind eye on the darker sides of infrastructure. It should be the goal of all those who deal with infrastructure development to minimize the death toll to which they continue to give occasion. Let it be the New Year’s resolution of all those involved with infrastructures to minimize it to the extent that they might.
Happy New Year to all.
Literature tip: Those interested in road safety will enjoy reading Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, by Peter D. Norton (MIT Press 2008). Readers wanting to know more about the St. Gotthard or the Panama Canal may find merit in Judith Schueler’s Materialising Identity: The Co-Construction of the Gotthard Railway and Swiss National Identity (Aksant 2008) and David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (Simon & Schuster 1977).
