Rail Baltica is a railway project that will eventually connect the Baltic countries with Poland and Germany. An undersea tunnel connecting Tallinn and Helsinki is being considered as a future extension.

As new railway connections typically cost a lot, its merits and drawbacks have been subject to heated debate. As railway transport plays only a small role in the overall infrastructure of the Baltic countries, very little of the debate has been of real value, as it’s a comparably novel topic for journalists as much as anyone else.

Quite a bit of what’s been run in the “arguments against” category hasn’t got the faintest thing to do with actual arguments.

When legendary Estonian banker and multi-millionaire Indrek Neivelt tells us that he really wouldn’t buy a train ticket to Berlin because he can get there faster by plane, that’s hardly a surprise. When journalists who started googling “railways” five minutes ago opine that there won’t suddenly be crowds of hundreds crazy about taking the same journey, all you’ve got left to do is shake your head in disbelief.

The underlying theme is how the project will eventually be financed. According to the official documentation, the Estonian state will eventually have to contribute some €500m — over the course of a decade.

That’s getting the new railway connection on the cheap, if anything. Yet even with this way of getting things organised, we’re decades away from breaking even.

Perspective is a matter of some difficulty in the Estonian economy. After in the 90s the first instinct was to sell anything that wasn’t bolted down, the boom in the early 2000s established the expectation that any new business has to yield a profit fast.

In effect, sustainability and building a larger business over time isn’t an aspect of doing business Estonia’s become particularly famous for. What you get here are serial entrepreneurs who excel at starting things quickly, only to sell or ditch a project entirely as soon as they see that profits will likely develop only slowly.

This kind of short-lived interest is represented in the media as much as it is in the general attitude towards economic activity. For a new railway, this means that people naturally expect that it should break even and make money very soon — or there’s no point building it.

So a lot of the arguments against Rail Baltica involve money — and a very basic misunderstanding of how railway construction works, and how it affects the economy of a country.

Railway construction on the European continent has hardly ever been a profitable undertaking for the company, the government or indeed the generation that decided to have a new line built. The costs are always staggering, and to assume that a privately run commercial enterprise can make up for the needed investments within 10–25 years is nothing short of absurd.

Still, you have to consider the broader context. One of the things that Rail Baltica will make possible, for instance, is for someone to live in Pärnu and work in Tallinn. The social and economic effects of that alone will shake up Estonia’s attitude to daily commutes and the planning of future metropolitan regions.

If the state provides infrastructure like this, what you get is change that will influence far more than the possibility to travel to Central and Western Europe by train.

If you say to a Tallinner today that you think a fast local train connection to Haapsalu would make sense, what you get is a bewildered stare. Though certainly not part of the Rail Baltica project, this would go a long way to demonstrate what railway construction does:

Haapsalu is just over 100 km out of the capital. A fast regional train connection, like you have them everywhere across Europe from Portugal to Finland, would reduce the commute from now 2 hours 37 minutes by public transport and 1 hour 22 minutes by car to a mere 40 minutes, perhaps 45–50 allowing for a few stops in between.

That would effectively turn Haapsalu into a new Nõmme or Pirita, increase its population, make way for real estate development and generally do it a lot of good. In fact, during rush hour you’d likely be home sooner travelling from Balti Jaam to Haapsalu than driving from the city centre to, say, Viimsi.

Your average Estonian listener will dismiss this summarily, telling you something down the line of “nobody will ever move someplace from where they need more than 20 to 30 minutes to get to work”.

Most Estonians are rather spoiled commuters. In Tallinn, due to the fact that the city is a collection of well-connected smaller centres, there being Kesklinn as a place to work, and Nõmme, Mustamäe, Haabersti, Õismäe, Lasnamäe and Pirita as residential areas, the commute to work seldom takes more than said 20–30 minutes, with the exception of two or three bottlenecks that make some routes a lot slower. That’s a very short commute compared to other European cities even of comparable size.

Another so-called argument you hear, this time from people in the country, is that “the railway doesn’t come anywhere close to where we are, so what good is it for us!”.

Understandable, of course. A fast line from Tallinn to Pärnu won’t benefit anyone living in a backwater like Jõgeva, you would think.

Yet that’s wrong. Making it possible for people living and working in Tallinn to move away from the city, even if it’s just in one direction for starters, will necessarily lead to a fundamental change in attitude.

Travelling through Estonia outside the three or four larger cities and towns, you get to see rather bleak conditions. What the Ansip and Rõivas governments will eventually be remembered for, next to their outrageous spending, is the systematic abandonment of the countryside -

And what this will eventually cost the state. The notion that both the social and the economic landscape of this country will remain the same for the decades to come is beyond naïve, yet that’s the prevailing view here.

You can’t expect private enterprise to go and invest in the southern county of Põlvamaa, for instance, if you’re more than happy to provide everything necessary just in the vicinity of the capital and the country’s largest port and airport.

You can’t expect people to spread across a larger area of the country and thus keep it alive while you deliberately starve the local infrastructure to save money you then fritter away needlessly elsewhere.

And more than anything, you can’t justify this policy of abandonment with some whimsical argument of perceived liberalism and political darwinism. Every government has a role to play in the economic development of its country. The current hands-off attitude is ruinous and absurd.

The advent of Rail Baltica has the potential to change all that. It’s not going to revolutionise the make-up of Estonia overnight, of course. But in the long run, its effects will contribute to reminding both the city slickers and the bunch populating the lofty castles of the executive branch that there are a few ten thousand square kilometres more to worry about. And that has plenty more weight than opening up a new way to travel to Berlin.