Daily Exasperation #9

We expect nothing and then we get what we expect. Pretty silly.

Short one today. Somehow I’m having a good, non-exasperated day, except for this: there are five daily Amtrak trips between Seattle and Portland (and vice versa). The trip takes about four hours. In Western Europe, two—no three—countries have figured out how to schedule five daily Amtrak trips between Paris and Amsterdam before 7:30 am. We can do better but we just don’t want to. If you’re about to respond, “Well there’s a much greater demand for Amsterdam to Paris than Portland to Seattle and those are much bigger cities,” you’re probably right, but that doesn’t mean that people who live in any of those cities—or any other cities for that matter—don’t deserve the same freedom to travel without being forced into a car. Just some food for thought.