Railways and roads are both important means of transportation, they help to transport the population and goods and facilitate the population flow and trading. However, in my point of view, I agree with the statement that governments should spend money on railways rather than roads.
First of all, railway development can help reduce the use of road traffic, and help reduce the carbon emissions from transportation. Government spending money on railways will help to develop a high-efficiency railway system in both passenger transport and cargo transport. It will encourage people to use public transportation, and reduce the use of private cars. Private car is the major source of carbon emissions, by reducing the number of private car, it can help to reduce the greenhouse gases generated by the private car. And goods can be transported by railways, reduce the use of trucks. From this point of view, we can understand that, the development of railways can help to reduce road traffic, and contribute to the decrease of the carbon emissions in transportation.
In terms of efficiency, the railway is performing better than roads. The average speed of train must be more faster than car, from Hong Kong to Beijing, it only takes 9 hours by high speed railways, but by driving a car will cost around 1 day. Which shows the time cost of train is much less than road traffic. And road traffic may be interrupted, affect the transportation efficiency. Besides, in the situation of cargo transportation, the train has more carry capacity than trucks, this also contributes to the efficiency performance of the railways. The high-efficiency of railway transportation will help the businesses to reduce their operation cost, and help the logistics in the country to bust the economy.
To conclude, I believed that by investing in the railways development will have more benefits to our society, environment, and economy.