The Past - and Future? - Of Transportation

A sixty-three year old man Raffi Kevonian settled down after his many travels throughout Europe and Asia. From Beirut as a child he grew and lived there until he was the age of eighteen to travel the world and see its sights. Now he sits at home working on the computer going around from time to time. He is currently working on making an office outside of his house but his sons think of it as the coolest hang out place ever. On occasion he and his family take a trip to Spain where his wife is from. His sons spend a lot of their time on the computer one of his main tools in his work which takes him to customers on the other side of the earth, and who knows maybe beyond. That is why he knows many languages that he might have picked up from his travels.

            My childhood? You mean where I was born? Well I was born in a house; we were four, two brothers, two sisters. We were a middle class family and it was a wonderful childhood. When I started traveling I was twenty. I traveled all across Europe, some middle eastern countries, Egypt, Syria, turkey, France, England, Spain, Belgium, Italy and then the United States. Most of the time when I traveled there I took a plane and sometimes by car.

Public transportation, well, I used the public transportation to get around from one point to another. Like in England, I used to use mostly the underground, and in Spain too. In most of Europe you can travel better than bus to use the metro or the underground. In the underground the conditions were pretty clean. Especially in Spain and France and England they were pretty clean, and safe in those days, now I don’t know what’s going on now. Between back then and now I don’t believe that transportation has changed much. They are still the same busses, the same underground, the metros, especially in Europe; some Middle Eastern countries started adapting some industrialized world transportation systems. But they are almost the same, not much, it has not changed much.

            Pollution? Well the pollution I still believe is the same because I don’t see that the government is doing anything special to reduce the pollution so, unless you go one hundred years ago where they used mostly trains with carbon, coal. But now from fifty years till today nothing has changed. The pollution was a big effect on a lot of people I believe. I believe it has affected a lot of people, for example asthma was not a sickness that generalized sickness, now you can find millions of people with these problems, and some skin, eczema, well I don’t know eczema. But a lot of sicknesses are due to the pollution.

            Driving is still the same. I was born in Beirut and until eighteen you were not able to have a driver’s license. So that’s when I started driving, when I was eighteen years old I got my drivers licenses. During the test for the license I failed the first time, well the car broke on me. I finished, I passed, and when I was trying to get out of the parking- he was going to give me the ok- but the power steering broke on me so I got stuck and I couldn’t pull out and I failed. I had to come back and take the test all over again, but I got it the second time.

            Also flying back then was not very popular because it was very expensive, it was a luxury. When someone traveled on a plane, it was something, or a trip to Europe we used to come back and start explaining or telling stories that he has done this, done that, because it wasn’t very often that people could travel to other countries, especially by plane. I remember the first time I traveled on a plane I was eighteen.

            At the time some of the fuels they used are not used today, like kerosene. All those are obsolete too in many countries, unless you go to Afghanistan you might find. They didn’t use coal for anything anymore, even trains.

            From back then till now I still believe that the best transportation is those things that ran with electricity and were clean. But the private companies, oil business and big interest in many cities took those and replaced them with buses which pollute the air. In Switzerland they still have those trains and I think in San Francisco there are those trains that go on the electric rail and those are very good transportation especially in the metropolitan areas of the cities because in the cities it’s a very good transportation while the buses contaminate and you name it and they need to replace the tires every year and the gas that they burn. That’s what I think that is a very good for avoiding pollution unnecessary pollution.

            The experimental fuels right now such as ethanol and hydrogen, I believe that there are some solutions but maybe it is too simple or too easy to implement not everything that is simple is accepted in the business community uh they came up with the splitting the water into hydrogen and use water to run cars and too many other uh experiments but uh it seems that it wasn’t convincing to the business world so now it is special to wait and see what they are going to decide on. Well solar is also a very good source of energy, which they need to improve the technology. For the cars and other types of transportation at some point they were trying to use the hydrogen using tap water now they are trying to find another alternative like ethanol or others.

Well maybe walking streets. You know that the streets walks instead of people walking or the cars walking. But like you know at the airports you have these straightaway escalators and the street walks and everything goes and when you get there you get off at your destination that might be a new type of transportation