PORTUGAL
I’m Going to Scream About Portuguese Trains Now
And you should too
Recently, the enlightened dunderheads in charge of my country have chosen to close yet another train station in the interior. In this case, they have opted to axe a station that is located at the heart of Coimbra.
I, like many others, have a vocal opinion about the continuous sabotage of Portugal’s infrastructure by our ruling class. To prevent this from being yet another article where I furiously snarl at multiple things all at once, I will instead organize this by listing 5 reasons why this, along with any removal of train stations in general, is a horrible idea.
1. Students and workers will be the ones who pay for this
For those of you that don’t know, Coimbra is a city with paralyzed development. It is primarily reliant on its university to keep a rotating population of students renting the properties closer to its center.
There is a lot already wrong with this, but here is the main issue: most people who live in Coimbra do so temporarily, often retreating to their hometowns during the weekend. These people are students, people whose careers have hardly taken off, if at all.
As a former student there, I can tell you that train station was a cheap, effective way for me to get to my home. It was close to most things, and even my relatively distant house was only a twenty-minute walk away. In some cases, I even managed to hop off the train and walk to the university to have classes right away.
Our saboteurs-in-chief would kindly point out that there is another station in our city, Coimbra-B. And what a station it is! Too far away from anything, planted in a spot where traffic is so dense being a pedestrian is unthinkable. It also lacks the history of the other station. To balance out all these negatives, it does have one important plus: it is connected to the only city that matters in this country, Lisbon.
Now, if I were a student with no way to reach the station that is closing down, I’d be left with two choices: calling a taxi or taking a bus. Either way, it’s an extra expense that will be paid for by people whose jobs, if they have any, are mostly fledgling and temporary. But hey, at least they’ll get to go to Lisbon without changing trains!
2. It plays into the hands of car lobbies
No, it’s not just in America that the automobile industry screws with infrastructure to maximize profits. Here in Portugal, we had a frivolous highway craze (with bribes under the table, of course) that ensured another city, Viseu, lost its train station. Let it be said here: Viseu is the largest European city without a train station, and it used to have one. If that doesn’t make a Portuguese ashamed of their leadership, nothing will.
Of course, the people who called for the crippling of Viseu needed only do it once. Portugal has become significantly poorer ever since she blew her wealth away on unnecessary roads. Having a dynasty of parasites in charge doesn’t help either.
Trains are expensive and require great planning. Roads can be built without any thought. Portugal’s economic management is deficient, to say the least. As soon as a station closes, the car lobby wins another battle. Our government is too poor and too corrupt to ever reopen a closed station.
Yes, there has been talk about a project to reconnect Viseu to her sister district capitals. Projects are fool’s gold, especially in my country. If they actually make it past the planning stage, then it will be years for them to be finished. Portugal takes ten years to build what she destroys in one, if she even finishes in the first place. This new station has been talked about for at least 3 years now, and is projected to come to be by 2030.
Let’s assume that the best happens. The construction company hired by the state doesn’t delay the work to inflate its budget. The rotating politicians in charge do not change their mind between at least two elections. The car lobbies do not pressure anybody to abolish this project. The new station opens by 2029/2030.
Even under the lofty assumption that corruption won’t rear its ugly head during this time, this still leaves us with 7 more years of car reliance, to add to the 32 that are already under our belts since 1990.
3. You shouldn’t believe the promises made by our rulers
The leadership of Portugal has mastered the ability to promise the grandiose. Delivering said promises is a skill they are still working on, though.
I’ll keep this short and simple. Even the closing of this station has been promised at first for 2020. Now it is promised for 2023, and it has already been postponed to the second half of the year too. The reason for the postponing is actually because Coimbra-B simply doesn’t have the capacity to suddenly take in the one million and three hundred thousand yearly workers and students that would find themselves suddenly forced to go there instead.
Let me rephrase that; the Portuguese government cannot even respect the deadlines it makes for the things it closes, let alone the things it will open. They can promise high-speed buses, metros, high-speed rails that span our whole nation. It matters little, because those promises will only stop being imaginary in who knows how long, and people’s needs will remain real until then.
An argument can be made in their favor. “At least they are aware that their remaining station can’t handle everybody.” It’s fair. No matter the bribery or the incompetence, they at least seem to know that. Allow me, however, to rephrase such an argument. “Unfortunately, despite their awareness of how many people will be shafted by this decision, they still want it to happen.” Doesn’t have such a nice ring to it, does it?
4. You might be slowly pushing a city towards isolationism
As a city built for tourists and students, the people of Coimbra are generally open to seeing new faces. A teacher of mine compared two cities rather recently: Porto and Viseu. I’m sorry, I can’t take myself seriously if I write Oporto.
Either way, the first city is the secondary capital of Portugal. Let’s say it earns itself 25% of our government’s attention, a counterweight to the 75% that goes to Lisbon. The way my teacher described its people was as “inquisitive, interested in new faces”. He said this to contrast with people in Viseu.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met lovely people in that city, but I could see what he meant. The people there tend to stick to their own, with considerable reluctance to investigate new faces. By the end of the comparison, we wondered how much such behavior wasn’t fostered by the lack of a train station, a reliable source of outsiders, in other words.
I’m hedging my words here because there might be more at play than simple infrastructure. Some people simply are more open than others. We must still admit it is not much of a stretch to assume closing a station can exacerbate the isolationist tendencies of a city, especially if they were already there in the first place.
5. What about the environment?
Yeah, I am far from the greenest individual out there. I am still old-fashioned enough to believe my recycling and usage of electric transports is hardly going to measure up against the pollution generated by the billionaire space race or even Greta Thunberg’s little stunt across the Atlantic.
That being said, I really wish the more hardcore environmentalists in my country would be more outraged about the 1.3 million people that will certainly start resorting to buses, taxis and cars to get somewhere in Coimbra.
Yes, yes, I know the metrobus that is allegedly going to replace this station is going to be powered by electricity too. Please refer to point 3 again. Until our Sisyphean construction project ends, there is no electric replacement for the station we’re about to lose. And believe me when I tell you, most of Portuguese cities are in some sort of construction limbo.
If our leaders have that much faith in the metrobus system, that’s great. Really. But it betrays a deep lack of trust in the end date of the project if they are rushing to close the station before its replacement comes to be. And before that replacement comes to be, it’s fuel all the way down.
