The world is complex. Humans are small. Humans are small things in a complex world. This means that in order to make sense of the world, humans have a need to classify everything and put things into groups. Statistically the number of beans which exist before you have a pile of beans, is in most people's eyes, about 23. Beyond that number, individual beans cease to exist. This is also true for class sizes of children as the optimal size for the number of kids in a class is 24.
On a podcast that I like to listen to, one of the things that has by now fallen into trope is the statements: Train good; Car bad; Plane worse. Now you could just rank all of the various kinds of transport on a scale of best to worst but in this case I like the idea of an alignment chart better. The classic alignment chart which came from role-play games is inadvertently a useful tool for assigning an extra dimension to things. In that respect it is a bit like the political compass which maps state authoritarianism vs individual liberty at right angles to state ownership vs private ownership.
On the vertical axis is what you would expect from Good at the top to Evil as the bottom. In the middle is a Neural position. On the horizontal axis is a scale from Predictable or Lawful on the left to Chaotic on the right. In the middle is a Neural position. When combined, these form a 3 x 3 grid; which can describe literally anything and anyone in the world. Dudley Do-Right and Rojer Ramjet are Lawful Good. Muffin Heeler is Chaotic Neutral. Dr Claw is Lawful Evil.
Lawful Good - Passenger Trains.
A train is such that no matter where you lay the tracks, that is where they go. Apart from scheduling and maybe signal failure, passenger trains are as close as you can get to a Lawful Good position. Trains literally can not go where they are not supposed to be unless something catastrophic happens.
Passenger Trains are a curious thing in that they were once the public display of wealth by very rich barons. The Railway Barons in an effort to display their wealth to the public, built great cathedrals to the train. Passenger Train service though, eventually became the domain of governments as a public good; transforming them from pure profit extraction machines for the rich and powerful, to more of an omnibus device which was for, by, and with everyone. When it became obvious that moving people across continents was faster by aeroplane, then governments began to step in, and it is curious that the fastest and best trains are almost always owned by government. Trains became for, by, and with the people.
Chaotic Good - Horse
What can you logically say about the Horse as a form of transport? Horse as animal? Okay. Horse as dinner? Delicious. Horse as racing device? Exploited. Horse as transport? Variable.
Horses are relatively high-strung animals, which is odd considering that they are quite big. Some horses are quite placid, some horses are nervous, some horses are nasty, some horses are lovely. A horse as a beast of burden which is pulling a cart or a wagon is likely to be reasonably calm most of the time but if something spooks it, then who knows what kind of fresh insanity has been unleashed. IN my part of the world, we have the tale of the wife of the Governor of New South Wales, who for whatever reason was riding on a Horse back from Parramatta to Government House when the Horse got spooked by something, reared up, and she was thrown from hit; wherein she was dashed against a tree and later found dead due to blunt force trauma.
As a cereal/hay/carrot/pumpkin powered mode of transport, Horses produce an awful amount of poop. As a beast of burden which is asked to pull a cart or a wagon, they do not have as much horsepower as even a relatively small motor car. As a beast of burden which is asked to pull a carriage, they are left behind in the dust by any motor car which can do 20km/h, 30km/h, and 40km/h, all day long.
Horse is romantic but unpredictable. Horse is simultaneously friendly and unfriendly and fast and slow.
Chaotic Evil - Pickup Trucks and Pickup Trucks With Guns On Them.
Pickup Trucks should be a useful tool with which to do business. They might have been that if they weren't then bought by Cosplay Cowboys who never ever let their Pickup Trucks get dirty, and with which they never ever do a day's business with them. Some of these Pickup Trucks have been bought by the kind of people who would have bought Falcons and Commodores but have found that this is a tax deductible way to do hoonery.
An average tradie in a genuine work vehicle, is obvious that they are in fact going to work because they practically display the tools of the trade for all the world to see (or else keep them in lock boxes) but your standard urban cosplay cowbow with a Pickup Truck in 97% of cases (I checked the NSW Revenue Office's data) is owned by a business; which means that we subsidise them through taxation write-offs. They then repay us in the general community by driving like A-grade knaves and self-entitled jackdaws.
Lawful Evil - Plane
Aeroplanes as a form of transport are genuinely awesome, as the amount of awe that they generate is immense. The amount of shock and awe that they generate when it all goes horribly wrong, when rivets fall off, or when doors fall off, or when engines fall off, or when they crash into each other on the runway, or if they crash into buildings, is also immense. The very visible awe generated by flying aeroplanes into buildings, was enough to alter the course of the opening decade of the twenty-first century and the outlay of $2,400,000,000,000.
From the fact that passengers are openly segregated by class, to the fact that they are forced to signal where they are from by nationality, in addition to being bombed out of their brains due to combinations of jet lag and/or being stuck at a place for tens of house, the whole experience as a passenger is capitalism writ large. The aeroplane is a transport technology that actively reminds you that the people to whom you pay rent to, are in fact better people and despite the fact that they actually do less work and don't actually provide anything meaningful to society, they somehow deserve better stuff. Money speaks for money; the devil for his own.
Lawful Neutral - Bus
Omnibus comes from the Latin "omnibus" which means "for, by, and with, everyone"; which is actually an excellent way to describe the omnibus. Buses' number plates in New South Wales mostly start with MO for "Motor Omnibus", which is distinct from HO "Horse Bus" and SO "Steam Bus"; which I find interesting is that the electric buses which are now on the road also carry MO plates.
A bus as a device which is for, by, and with the people, occupies a smaller space than a train yet actually contributes to traffic by being one cell amidst a flowing river of them. As a bus occupies a smaller space than a train it also means that the worst of humanity, which includes rudeness, vomiting and the expulsion of other bodily fluids, can and does sometimes happen on a bus. The "Night Bus" or "NightRide" manages to compact the worst of humanity into a small space immediately after the imbibing of many fermented vegetable products and in addition to when the temperature has dropped into single digits.
Most of the time though, a bus is a neutral space which is not evil but not explicitly good. A bus service is a good thing to have but due to the nature of being delivered way out into the suburbs, often the stops are just a pole with a sign attached. The actual funness of a bus journey is mostly determined by the quality of the scenery it travels through.
Neutral Good - Tram
I like trams. As a piece of infrastructure that move around a lot of people, trams are better than a bus and funner than a bus. As light rail vehicles they can be made to travel together with regular traffic, or via dedicated paths. Trams and their routes integrate themselves into the cultural overlay of the community far more readily than a bus does. People take a bus out of necessity but people will take a tram out of a sense of fun.
It was the tram by virtue of needing tracks to drive down and the fact that cars and horse carts and bicycles had skinny little wheels at the time, that gave us the Hook Turn. I find it a little crazy given that the flag of Hookturnistan is so iconic, that it hasn't made its way to being either the default or away kit of some Melbourne sporting team. I also find it odd given that the rules actually work so well, that we haven't yet adopted it in Sydney.
Chaotic Neutral - Car
The car is arguably the most ubiquitous piece of transport there is. As a piece of individual transport, they are just about the most individual mechanised transport of all. However that individual comes with both individual freedom as well as the root problem of the human condition that everyone without exception is individually selfish.
Isn't it funny that on a road posted with a speed limit of 60, that someone doing 55 is a moron and someone doing 70 is an idiot? However, if it is you or I doing 55 or 70, suddenly we demand that everyone else treats us nicely because we need to be careful or concentrate, or move out of the way because we are in a hurry.
A car allows someone to do the mundane things like going to work, going grocery shopping, or carting the family around to various activities; it also allows someone to do fun things like going on massive road trips, going to sport or to see family, or even a means to itself when all you want to do is drive. When everyone decides to do roughly the same thing at the same time, then all of those pieces of individual freedom are welded together to form the negative externality of traffic. Isn't it funny that on a road with lots and lots of cars all doing 15, that you and they are traffic and a hinderance and I am just going about my business?
The fact that there are motor accidents and pedestrians occasionally being struck down, is testament to the fact that it didn't take very long for the street to turn from a place where people moved, to one where they were excluded. The word 'pedestrian' only exists in opposition to the car and the weird thing is that we are mostly fine with sacrificing the occasional person to these modern Molochs because individual freedom is the thing we have decided is what we value more than life itself.
Neutral Evil - Truck
Big trucks are one of the pillars of the economy. They are the conveyors of all the stuff there is to buy; which includes your dinner. Be it semi trailers that do heavy haulage, or the road trains which carry commodities, or the rigid lorries that take packaged goods to the grocery store, without trucks everyone comes to a stand still.
Trucks are a necessary evil in a civilised society. Granted that there are a few select people who are in awe of the bigness of the vehicles and there are some people who are drawn to become truck drivers because they like the fun that comes from being in control of such a big thing, but they are rarely fun for the drivers and even less fun for everyone else on the roads. Trucks are a necessary evil because work is a necessary evil. Work is heat and heat is work and work is a curse, and all the heat in the universe is going to cool down because that's entropy.
Having said that, the standard of driving from truck drivers is simply amazing. I have no idea how these people are able to calculate physical space and have such spatial awareness that they can swing a big thing through traffic and often through spaces that never look like an 18-wheel box trailer will fit; buit they do with exceptional regularity. This isn't chaos but some kind of orchestrated waltz to an unheard tune.
True Neutral - Bicycle
Chaos? Yes. Just think about teenagers doing mad skids in the shopping centre, or doing jumps through a creek bed, or setting up ramps and bumps to jump off of. If you are between the ages of about 7 and 16, then a bicycle is almost licence to go out and commit unqualified chaos. If you want to chuck rocks at sign, ride over a full milk carton just to see it explode open and splash, or use it to make a quick getaway after doing ding-dong-dash, then the bicycle is the ultimate tool of choice.
Order? Yes. Think about the thousands of people who ride to work in the Netherlands, or China, or the few people who ride to work in my fair city. What of the kids who ride to school who are too young to drive? Sport? Yes. We have velodrome racing, BMX racing, mountain biking, long distance racing like Le Tour or the Giro. Work? Yes. We have couriers who can zip around the spaces inside the city where cars can not go. Litter? Yes. My city has rental bike services which nobody really uses but helpfully throw into the harbour.
The bicycle is true neutral because it occupies every other square; sometimes multiple squares at the same time.
Lawful Good - Passenger Trains
Lawful Good - Ferry
Neutral Good - Tram
Neutral Good - Running
Chaotic Good - Horse
Chaotic Good - Sailing Ship
Lawful Neutral - Bus
Lawful Neutral - Goods Trains
True Neutral - Bicycle
Chaotic Neutral - Car
Chaotic Neutral - Boat
Lawful Evil - Plane
Lawful Evil - Container Ships
Lawful Evil - Oil Tranker Ships
Lawful Evil - Private Yacht
Neutral Evil - Truck
Chaotic Evil - Pickup Trucks
Chaotic Evil - Pickup Trucks With Guns On Them
