The goal of this page on the Community of European Railway Infrastructure Companies (CER) website is to highlight the benefits of railway infrastructure projects. To that end, the focus of the text is to compare greenhouse gas emissions from rail travel to those of road travel. Aside from several extra spacings, this page is sleek and well organized, and succinctly conveys its main points. The entire website has many pages and PDFs that would be helpful, should the reader decide to conduct further research. However, the title of the organization as well as the lack of evaluation of the negative impacts of railways indicates a bias. While this page is a fine source for solid figures that demonstrate the benefits of rail, its ultimate goal is marketing their products to the general public, and therefore certain important information is likely omitted.

This is a screenshot I took of the Google Maps data on Shenandoah National Park. John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt initially intended the United States’ national parks to conserve the nation’s reserves of natural, untouched beauty, but in the last century the parks’ main purpose has shifted to tourism, and here we see two major roadways intersecting at the middle of this Virginia national park. What remains unseen at this magnification is the offshoots of smaller roads that spring from Skyline Drive–which runs lengthwise through the park–and further penetrate the forest (see below).