But now to find a place to swim where I wouldn’t be anxious that someone would grab my wallet and camera. It wasn’t easy, because most of the waterfront was just sand, sunshades and sea. However, at the other end of the bay the road climbs onto a low hill, then drops down again to a rocky coast of rugged black volcanic stone arranged in flat slabs with deep crevasses. I climbed down to where rocks met the sea in convenient little outcrops and lazy pools of clear water. The crevasses seemed made for hiding things. I stripped off and dived in. Swimming out beyond the rocks, it felt good to be in a place that was neither past nor future, nor commerce nor image, but just me, now, in the salty water under the hot sun.
DRYING OFF ON MY towel, I tried to get my mind around Ferrovie Sud Est. It was a railway of some one thousand miles, so its website claimed, serving the heel of Italy. There was a station as far south as Santa Maria di Leuca, on the very tip of the land. All around, the coastline was marvellous and the villages of the interior picturesque, a tourist’s dream, for the most part undeveloped, used almost exclusively in July and August, when the Italians themselves holiday, but empty for the rest of the year. Foreigners were rare. And even where there was a steady flow of people between towns or from town to coast, the rail service was underused. The European Union, it seems, had thrown money at it. It was politically correct to throw money at railways since they were understood to be an environmentally sustainable form of transport. But the money they had thrown was wasted because there hadn’t been enough of it to create a service that people would actually use. People preferred their cars, which gave them speed and freedom, even though it’s generally agreed that cars are one of the major factors behind global warming and we would all be better off if they were used a great deal less.
What would it take to get people to use these railways, or indeed any local railways?
The service would have to be such that you arrived at an easily accessible station and found regular and punctual trains heading straight for your destination at reasonable prices, with easy onward transport from that destination.
This was a lot to ask. It was an investment far beyond the funding for quaint stations and weed killing.
Then even if by some miracle this service were provided, would people use it? Some would. But not enough. To have a significant number of people use it, other forms of transport would have to be made decidedly unattractive. Cars would have to be too expensive, too hard to drive and park and keep. Of course, this is already happening. In the very week I write, petrol has just passed the €2 a litre threshold. Motorways are expensive. Parking can be difficult. In fact, car sales are falling sharply (20 per cent last year). But it’s still not enough, such is the desire for personal freedom, the desire to travel alone, to start and stop whenever and wherever you like, moving at exhilarating speed, hitting brake and accelerator, controlling every aspect of one’s journey, with an on-board navigator to eliminate anxieties about routing, your air conditioning set at exactly the temperature you desire, and your own music system playing the songs you like, not to mention the space in the boot for all the luggage you want to carry. People find this an attractive package.
So what would it take to make this railway, any local railway, viable?
An effort of collective will. A decision, a draconian decision, made together, as a society, that rail travel was the thing, that car travel must be penalised. This is the only way that an efficient, perhaps even solvent rail service could be introduced.
But would such a decision be right?
I had been following the debate on rail travel in England, where prices are so high that those who have to commute by rail find themselves paying season tickets costing thousands of pounds. On the radio I had heard the anti-rail lobby questioning whether those who don’t use the railways should be asked to subsidise them, as if it were a matter of paying for someone else’s cinema tickets; and the prorail lobby saying in timid response that road users should be happy because the railways kept further car users off the road, making road travel easier for them.
What pious nonsense. As if there was ever a question of a level playing field in the competition among modern transportation systems. As if the roads hadn’t received vast amounts of state subsidy. As if the principle that one should only pay for what one uses could ever make sense in a society, or indeed allow for the existence of a society at all; one’s reminded of those Americans who object to paying a school tax because they don’t have children, as if we didn’t all have an interest in an educated younger generation. Could the users of a metro system pay for it before it was there? They could not.
So, I concluded, the underlying issue is this: do we make decisions about transportation on the basis of what is most comfortable for each individual now, or can we plan for what is collectively most efficient and sustainable, even if not always and in each moment the most desirable? Clearly a train line whisking everyone from Lecce to all points along the coast is a much more efficient use of resources than the present reliance on cars. It would mean less pollution in the air, and
