In the previous part we saw that travel is an ancient right and a deep human need. But now we must look with open eyes at the real world and ask: today, how far is that right actually within the reach of the people of the earth?
The answer is a troubling picture. The world we live in, for all its progress, still keeps millions of human beings from movement and from connection; and its network of communication rests upon a foundation more fragile than we imagine.
Let us count the obstacles one by one.
The first obstacle is the tyranny of geography. In the world of today, dozens of countries are “landlocked”; that is, they have no route at all to the open sea, and in order to reach the markets of the world they are obliged to make a difficult passage across the soil of their neighbours. This dependence carries a heavy price. The United Nations reports that thirty-two landlocked countries, with a population of nearly six hundred million people, pay trading costs some thirty per cent higher than coastal countries, and that their transport costs are more than double those of their coastal neighbours.
The result is devastating: although these countries contain more than seven per cent of the world’s population, they hold only about one and two-tenths per cent of global exports. Experts at the United Nations say that the level of development in these countries is roughly twenty per cent lower than it might have been had they possessed access to the sea, and that their economic growth is on average six per cent slower. The Secretary-General of the United Nations body for trade and development describes these countries as being invisible to a great part of the world. Some of them, such as Kazakhstan, lie more than three thousand seven hundred kilometres from the nearest coast.
And the consequence of this tyranny can be seen upon the map of the earth’s population: the interior lands of the continents, for want of transport, have been all but abandoned, and human beings have crowded towards the shores.
But this is only part of the story. Even for those countries which do have a way to the sea, the main arteries of world trade pass through a handful of narrow and vulnerable gateways. Maritime transport today carries about eighty per cent of the volume and half the value of world trade, and a great part of that trade passes through a few maritime “chokepoints” — straits and canals which, if they were closed, would paralyse the world.
The Strait of Hormuz alone is the gateway for about a fifth of the world’s oil; close to twenty million barrels a day pass through it. The Strait of Malacca, at its narrowest some two and a half kilometres across, carries something between a quarter and a third of the world’s maritime trade and eighty per cent of China’s energy imports. The Suez Canal takes about twelve to fifteen per cent of maritime trade, and the Panama Canal about five per cent.
Put simply, the whole commerce of mankind hangs upon a few slender threads.
And the fragility of those threads is no longer a theoretical worry. In recent years, insecurity in the Red Sea and the Strait of Bab al-Mandab obliged many ships to take the long route around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa — a way which added between nine and seventeen days to the journey and drove costs sharply upwards. One accident, one moment of tension, or one ship run aground in a narrow strait is enough to raise the price of goods on the far side of the world. A world in which everything is tied to a few waterways is a world that is always one step away from crisis.
Alongside these great obstacles there is a third, which bears more directly upon the lives of ordinary people: cost and the inequality of access. For a large part of the world’s people, travel — even a short journey for work, for medical treatment or to visit family — is expensive, difficult or impossible. In many regions the roads and railways either do not exist, or are worn out and costly. Someone born in a remote village will often remain within that same small compass to the end of his life; not because he does not wish to see the world, but because there is no road for him. And as we saw in the previous part, it is precisely this deprivation which turns little by little into frustration and inequality.
Three ways of moving: air, sea and rail. In order to understand where the way out lies, it is worth setting the three principal means of moving people and goods side by side and weighing them impartially; for each has its strength and its weakness, and I do not wish here to press the scales in favour of any one of them.
The aeroplane is the fastest. It carries a consignment to the other side of the world in three to seven days, and a passenger in a matter of hours. But that speed comes at a heavy price: carrying freight by air is five to fifteen times more expensive than by other means, and in terms of pollution it is catastrophic. Every tonne-kilometre of freight carried by air produces something like five hundred to a thousand grams of carbon dioxide — close to twenty-seven times that of a diesel train. Beyond this, the aeroplane can carry only light and low-volume cargo, and is incapable of carrying heavy loads. The air is the way of speed, but it is not the way of the many, nor a sustainable one.
The ship stands at the opposite pole. It is the cheapest way and has the greatest capacity; a single great vessel can move tens of thousands of tonnes of cargo — even loads so heavy that no aeroplane could manage them — and in terms of pollution it is also the cleanest means of carrying freight, at something like ten to forty grams per tonne-kilometre. But it has two great weaknesses. First, it is very slow; the voyage from Asia to Europe takes twenty to forty-five days. Second, and more important, the ship reaches only the ports. For the billions of human beings who live in the heart of the landmass, the sea is no help at all; and as we have seen, all this maritime trade itself passes through a few vulnerable chokepoints.
And between these two stands the railway — precisely at the point of balance. It is faster than the ship; the existing rail route from China to Europe takes some fifteen to twenty-one days, against about forty days by sea. It is far cheaper than the aeroplane. And in terms of pollution, the diesel train sits alongside the ship: about twenty to fifty grams of carbon dioxide per tonne-kilometre. For the passenger, too, rail at around sixty-two grams per person-kilometre is far cleaner than air travel.
The railway has a high capacity, it carries heavy loads, and — most important of all — it goes into the heart of the landmass, to the very places the ship cannot reach and where the aeroplane is not economical. And unlike the sea, it is not dependent upon chokepoints; it can go by many different routes, and if one way is closed, another remains open.
So if we were to imagine an ideal means of movement — reasonably fast, cheap, clean, high in capacity, and reaching to the remotest points of the landmass — the railway is the closest thing to it.
But here we come to a key fact, and if you want the truth of it, this one sentence was the seed of this entire book: today the rail networks are for the most part enclosed within a single continent and are not joined to one another. The railway is the best possible instrument, and it has not yet become global.
And it is precisely here that the idea of this book is born. But before that, let us see in the next chapter where the world is heading if everything continues as it is.
Sources: reports and statistics of the United Nations (UN-OHRLLS and UNCTAD) concerning landlocked countries; research in Nature Communications (2025) on maritime chokepoints; data from the International Energy Agency concerning the Strait of Hormuz; industry reports on the Straits of Malacca, Suez, Panama and Bab al-Mandab; comparative data on carbon emissions, cost and transit time across the three modes of air, sea and rail (DEFRA, the International Energy Agency, the transport industry, 2025–2026).