Train Stations and Public Life

The Coghlan station in Belgrano is in decay. The century-old stations on both sides of the tracks are run-down, wood-paneled ticket offices shuttered, adjacent trees growing wild (which led to major power shutdown when branches brought down the lines, and gives pigeons perfect aim to drop their donations on waiting passengers). Planters with dying plants are littered around the outside of the stations. Everything is gray.

This is what is called progress through privatization.

It is a common story: public services and infrastructure that serve people well are privatized (because the IMF demands it; because there is a budget crisis and it is assumed that selling off public goods will help; or because someone believes -- by "believe" I mean something much closer to faith than conviction based on fact -- that it will lead to greater efficiency). We are still in the midst of a revolution that has led to the privatization of much of what was once done publicly, i.e. by the government, with public service as its primary mission. The result has been, almost universally, higher expense, worse service, and greater profits for the companies who were supposed to be providing more efficient services at less taxpayer expense.

Such is the case with Coghlan. Once an elegant train station (even though the neighborhood is wealthier than it has ever been), with a staff of five or six who took tickets, tended the landscape (including trimming the trees so that the birds were not perched over the heads of customers) and kept the place clean. The resulting privatization eliminated those jobs (there is one staffperson for the whole station), raised prices....and transferred the profits "northward" (i.e. to the corporate offices).

I visited Coghlan on Wednesday because my new friend and artist Patricio, an Argentinian trainspotter with an obsession with train lines on par with Sasha (my brother), surreptitiously brought back the original signage for the station, introduced more benches to the platform which had exactly one. He has worked with a small "Friends of Coghlan" group to preserve the station. But they have had little luck. Patricio was only able to return the original sign design because the private company didn't care enough to notice that he had returned the sign to the station.

This visit reminded me of a panel I was on not long after 9/11, at NYU. I'm not sure the title of the panel, but we were each talking about the future of New York after 9/11. I spoke, with bad luck, right before Richard Sennett (well, the good luck was that because people knew he was next, stayed to hear my presentation). One point he made stuck with me. He spent half the year in London and he said that when he returned to the United States he always felt that when he used public services in the U.S. he was moving back in time - the underinvestment in public services had left the U.S. an underdeveloped developed country.

Coghlan reminded me of how much poorer countries (although Argentina was, at the beginning of the 20th century, one of the wealthiest countries in the world) often have far greater investment in public life. It also reminded me that one of the U.S.'s most significant and latest exports is the notion of selling off public goods, leaving a world of run-down stations and pigeon droppings.