Abstract
Much of the discourse surrounding national intercity passenger rail service in the United States revolves around why it has lagged so far behind European and Asian counterparts. However, a more interesting question might be why it has survived despite competition from faster, more nimble transport modes, discriminatory public policy, and the ascension of neoliberal discourse hostile to public endeavor. This paper uses the concept of durability in actor-network theory to offer some insights into how the system has achieved a remarkable but problematic stability, and how that durability relates to an imagined role for national intercity passenger rail in a future of increasingly constrained material resources. This paper also demonstrates the application of actor-network theory (ANT) in a way that can serve as a useful introduction to and template for the use of that methodology.
Highlights
The United States is unique in the developed world for its limited role in national intercity passenger rail
Chen notes that high-speed rail (HSR) proposals have appeared in Congress in perennial waves that coincide with economic downturns and Keynesian calls for economic stimulus and job creation [49]
This paper has demonstrated how actor-network theory (ANT) can be used to aggressively address both the social and technical aspects of passenger rail in a way that offers a perspective distinct from research that separates the social and technical worlds into distinct statistical reductions
Summary
The United States is unique in the developed world for its limited role in national intercity passenger rail. Much of the extant scholarship on railroads focuses on specific (and often fetishized) aspects of railroads like equipment, infrastructure, economics, or organization, often making it difficult to see the semiotic relationships between those different entities in the socio-technical networks and locking the internal social networks as static. Much of the extant scholarship on railroads focuses on specific (and often fetishized) aspects of railroads like equipment, infrastructure, economics, or organization, often making it difficult to see the semiotic relationships between those different entities in the socio-technical networks and locking the internal social networks as static structures. This paper uses a conception of passenger rail travel as locomobility, analogous to similar systemic conceptions of auto and air travel as automobility and aeromobility, respectively [8,9,10,11]
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