We Can Solve All Of Our Problems, Actually (Or, A Fortnight in Western Europe)

Travels through the UK, Italy, and Switzerland have taught me so much.

Never so much an evangelist is the zealot turned shoe salesman.

Readers: I am here to tell you about my recent escapades in exasperation also known as “Sam takes a two-week trip to Europe and is somehow equally hopeful and saddened by what he’s seen.” I’ve visited five cities on my trip (I’m still here, writing this from my hotel, ideally situated 800m from Zürich Hauptbahnhof, and hugs the Limmat River by way of a two-way tram right-of-way and shared-use sidewalk that’s on a Monday evening teeming with visitors, schleppers, locals, equally on foot as on two wheels. There are water taxis and leisure cruises slurping up the clean water, shuttling passengers to and from Zürich’s gargantuan lima bean lake—Zürichsee. Yes, I see. I float. There are cars, too. Based on a Very Official™️ count I noticed zero parking spots along Limmatquai and zero people giving a shit about it.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Henry Grabar’s (and Joni Mitchell’s) Paved Paradise is here. It’s everywhere but home it seems. I’m drawing renewed life, and hope, from the fact that this is possible in the US; I’m frustrated because I know it won’t. I don’t want to feel resigned to try, but that’s what it’ll be as we fight for scraps and throw on two left shoes.

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Two Weeks’ Journies’ Diary.

I visited five places during my trip: London, Rye, Lecco, St. Moritz, and Zürich. Here’s a map because I know you nerds love maps:

The mode breakdown is approximately this:

NYC Subway: Home → JFK. This is a trip I make all the time on the A Train + AirTrain. What a ripoff, but wow so reasonable compared to some of the transport I took while in Switzerland. $8 feels like a steal in all senses of the word.

Direct flight: JFK → London Gatwick. Gatwick is one of five airports that serve Greater London; it’s located south of the city center. FYI customs was extremely easy, but no stamp 😒. The flight, via Norse Atlantic, was barebones but wicked cheap and efficient. I’m all about saving as much as possible on travel.

Express Train: London Gatwick → East Croydon via the Gatwick Express. Fun fact: TfL has an OMNY-style fare collection on all of its various properties including the Under/Overground, Regional Rail, DLR, etc. Not once did I have to fumble to purchase a ticket in a clunky app or dig around for coins and bits and bobs. In fact, I didn’t use cash one time in two weeks. Equity concerns accounted for—what if someone is unbanked?—this is the future of the velocity of money. It’s Web 2.5—the goods and services I purchased used actual, real government money—but the transactions are seamless.

Drive: East Croydon → Rye → Crystal Palace. There is a train from London (St. Pancras) to Rye (Sussex) that requires a quick transfer and has a total trip time of 1 hour, 9 minutes, and costs ~£75 return (about $85) per person. The car we hired for the weekend cost £202 + £20 in petrol + £5 in parking fees. Split three ways, this comes out to a wash, but since Rye is a tiny town with, as we found out one taxi driver who’s very hard to reach, the added flexibility was worth it. We could take a cheeky half-hour detour to visit a new friend (hi Ham Street Wines via Matt Kroneberger!) without the hassle of schedules that didn’t suit our needs. This is what I’m usually arguing about: we had the choice to take a train (or a bus) or drive. Based on our needs we chose what worked for the group. Had I been with transit evangelists, the choice might have been different. Choice.

Overground/DLR: Crystal Palace → London City Airport. The London Overground and the Docklands Light Rail (DLR) are two concession operators seamlessly integrated into London’s metro system. The Overground behaves like a regional rail and is gigantic; the DLR is an automated light rail system—the trains do not have engineers or operators (they do, however, have ticket checkers to ensure riders have paid the tap on/off fare). This was a simple and seamless process; the DLR stops directly at London City Airport, which hugs the River Thames between Canary Wharf to the west and an industrial/business center to the east. It mainly serves regional destinations (like Milan, see below), but has the capacity to serve flights to JFK, too.

Direct hop: London City Airport → Milan Malpensa Airport. This was a quick 90-minute flight. I rarely get to use staircases to board/alight a flight so that was fun.

Taxi: Milan Malpensa Airport → Lecco: We chose an expensive-as-hell taxi (more on the expensive-as-hell taxis later) split four ways rather than a two-seat journey from the airport to center-city Milan, then to Lecco. I’d have preferred the transit here to see how it worked. It would have added an additional hour onto our journey (and we still would have required the last-mile trip from the Lecco train station (there is one!) with heavy bags and another town with a handful of colorful taximen (“Pronto!” on iPhone, one; “Pronto!” on flip-phone, two) on three hours sleep and no bearings. It was an expensive choice, but one we made. The hired car and driver cost double the train. But we had a choice.

~Interlude~ Water taxi: Lecco → Bellagio → Lecco. If you, in your life, get the opportunity to take this day trip, do it. Stunning. Cheap in a sea of ungodly prices, and we’re not even in Switzerland, yet.

Hired car: Lecco → Tirano. This was the hiccup that was bound to happen. Originally, the plan was to take the direct train (with stunning views) from Lecco to Tirano, the southbound, Italian terminus of our next leg. Simple and elegant (and cheap)—two hours and €10. Here’s where we got tripped up, twice and double-like. A landslide had knocked out a portion of this journey with aplomb and gusto. There was to be an emergency express bus to take travelers from Lecco to the station after the affected one. Easy, no problem. Nice fix, Italy. Aha! But here’s the second hiccup that we learned about nigh too late: a planned rail strike for the exact day we needed to take the train.

These strikes, along with other labor events, are frequent and I support them in theory. They’re supposed to be annoying so the workers, who work tirelessly to build, maintain, and operate an efficient and effective system, can get fair wages and safe conditions. But that meant “sparse and essential service,” which, for the life of me (and Google Translate), I could not figure out what that meant or how that affected us.

The options were limited: we had to be at Tirano for 13:17 to catch our next, booked, leg. Remember our taximan (“Pronto!”)? He wanted to charge us €250 for the ride. No, thank you. But what else could we do? We could cut out the last night of our journey in Lecco, and take a train the night before the strike—and forfeit the rooms we’d already paid for—to leave early and pay for another room. This certainly would have cost us more than the outrageous taxi fare. We could have chanced “essential” services and almost certainly missed our journey. No, some quick thinking found a car for hire—for €120 or €30 each. Three times as expensive as the train, but an hour faster, and we could be in control of our own destiny. Hired car it was. Great views and a relatively simple trip through the Alps. Feel terrible for me. Truly, I’m having an awful time.

1st Class UNESCO World Heritage Bernina Express: Tirano, Italy → St. Moritz, Switzerland. I was most excited for this portion of the holiday and that should not surprise you. I have a hat (not a conductor’s hat, though, I did think about it) and a mug to commemorate the journey along with a souvenir tin of Swiss chocolate, which they just call chocolate here. This was a 2-hour journey through some of the most magnificent scenery I’ve ever observed and will likely ever observe again. Snow-capped peaks and lush valleys fight for the horizon here; it’s an overwhelming trip (split in half with a quick detour at the edge of the Earth and a shot of Braulio). The train is silent and efficient. It arrives just when it means to, even though most of the journey is single-tracked, and leaves not a minute early or late. Pictures don’t do this journey justice, but here’s a few anyway.

Taxi: Bahnhof St. Moritz → AirBnB. I’m including this because a 5-minute taxi ride was 20 CHF. Unbelievably expensive, but required after a long day of travel. Had we understood our bearings, we could have hoofed it. (AirBnB was stunning and spectacular, if not a little strange…a lot Swiss. We didn’t understand our host at all but still managed to hand gesture enough to gesticulate a common understanding. She was Italian, so, you know the one.)

Train/Cable Car: Bahnhof St. Moritz → Bernina Diavolezza → Diavolezza Cable Car, return. Missed the hourly train by 1 minute here, but that’s really fine since I got to sit and stare at the lake and the mountains for an hour and contemplate what the actual hell I’m doing “working.” But this was a fun little half-day excursion I took solo. Expensive, but fun and once-in-a-lifetime, too. Had a spot of lunch atop the peak, while staring at more peaks. It was the only cable car open at this point in the season.

Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix: Watching Max Verstappen absolutely dominate Monte Carlo. I didn’t make this journey, but it was a transportation-related event, so now you get to hear about my new obsession with Formula 1 racing. I didn’t get it, but now I get it. I know it’s cars, but it’s cool. Cars are sometimes cool. These are cool cars. But still…ban cars?

Regional Rail: Bahnhof St. Moritz → Chur → Zürich Hauptbahnhof. We completed the UNESCO heritage train journey and the cutoff was exactly right. Lots of the Swiss countryside is boring. But the train journey was easy, and the connection was perfect. No complaints here (very, very expensive: 80 CHF).

I have two or three upcoming journeys: Train (Zürich HB → Zürich Flughafen), Direct Flight (Zürich Flughafen → JFK), Airtrain + Subway (JFK → Home), which I assume will be uneventful. But I’ll update if not.

I loved traveling through Europe using all the modes I could. In addition to car and train. We walked a lot, because it was relatively safe to do so in all five of my destinations. I biked in London, which has comparatively a ton more protected bike lanes (more on this) and I didn’t feel like I was going to die, often, always, like I do when biking in New York, Philadelphia, DC, Boston, or Seattle, etc. I didn’t take the bus, for no other reason than it wasn’t the best option at any given time. But Londoners and Mortizians love the bus. I love the bus. I’m sorry, bus.

Lessons Learned and Policy Implications

This section is incredibly painful to write because I know how unlikely all of these options actually are, in principle and in practice. I’ve been at this awhile. I’ve got six(ish) lessons observed, and of course, nothing to be learned because we’re trapped in an American hellscape, bound and battered by the dumbest possible system.

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Lesson #1: Narrow streets are possible and necessary for a safe and slow system. The vehicles must shrink accordingly.

Jarrett Walker has always made the most sense to me on this issue:

When we are talking about space, we are talking about geometry, not engineering, and technology never changes geometry.  You must solve a problem spatially before you have really solved it.

What London has—and what Rye, Lecco, St. Moritz, and Zürich have—are narrow, winding roads, remnants of pre-automobile city planning. These places also have their fair share of wider limited-access roads, necessary for higher-speed travel that mimics old railroad rights-of-way. We should never, ever have built roads wide enough for high speeds in our cities in the United States. For one—safety and the associated equity challenges it created are going to take decades to fix. For another, it’s so unbelievably unpleasant to have to drive everywhere or to have to walk right next to vehicles barrelling along at 75 mph. It’s a geometry issue: the narrower the road, the slower drivers are inclined to travel for nothing else but self-preservation.

Added benefits: how do we narrow streets? By widening sidewalks and adding protected bike lanes! We get mobility upgrades and safety upgrades at the same time.

Simultaneously, we must start selling smaller cars if we have to sell more cars at all (we do and will). In any city, there is just no reason at all to own a car that can kill a child because the driver couldn’t see them over the front of the car. But this is what we’re dealing with.

What about parking? The lesson from London is this: many narrow roads still support two-sided parking. Sometimes the cars pop up onto the sidewalk (not ideal, but they seem to handle it well); the real trick is that some of these street typologies have a single travel lane traversed two ways. Londoners have figured out how to navigate these challenges with creative usage of headlight flashing, a cheery wave of thanks, and no lasting problems by way of a Briton’s love of a queue.

Policy Implication: Every city in the US should immediately begin a street redesign, taking notes and cues from NACTO’s Urban Street Design Guide and lessons learned from extensive travel. This is not challenging in theory. It takes leadership and a vision—a thesis for a city’s mobility—which zero US cities currently have. That’s the real Vision Zero.

Likelihood of any change whatsoever in the next five years: 0%.

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Lesson #2: Walking is the safety lock; sidewalks are the key.

Many, many transportation advocates have advocated for a national sidewalks building program akin to the national interstate highways program. It is unreal how many places ostensibly built for walking have no paths for safe travel.

Seriously what the hell is this? Source.

This type of planning is all too common because we’ve prioritized asphalt for motor vehicles at every decision point in our transport planning history. Sidewalks, as evident, continue to be a nice-to-have rather than a must for many urban, suburban, and rural streets. Why is this the case?

Meanwhile, walking is a trusted and important mode almost everywhere in Europe. There was an incident with a narrow bridge in Lecco that we managed to avoid by asking if we could walk. The answer was no (“Pronto!”) and it was a slight dent in the ironclad idea that you can walk anywhere in Europe safely. We were defeated by topography and hydrology. There truly was not any room between the mountain and the lake for anything more than a tiny Alfa Romeo to drive through. In the dark and around blind spots—walking truly was the least good option. Everywhere else in Lecco? Beautiful to walk. St. Moritz? Woonerfs everywhere. Zürich? Walking is perfect and harmonizes nicely with the biking and tram culture. More woonerfs.

Photo by Tobias A. Müller on Unsplash

The US?

Policy Implication: Congress needs to require and fund each State DOT to organize an auditable state sidewalk census and then pay for the installation of necessary sidewalks 90/10 the same way it did highways. Yes, the logistics and geometry will be tricky. The US needs a National Sidewalks Program.

Likelihood of any change whatsoever in the next five years: 10% (-10% if Democrats lose a lot). The fatality and safety crisis is getting worse. The Safe Streets for All (SS4A) Initiative is a good start but it’s discretionary and the applications were skewed heavily in favor of planning and not implementation—we’re a long way off.

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Lesson #3a: “Density” needed to support regional and national rail is a myth.

Lesson #3b: Italian trains are inconsistent, but they’re still a great option when available. Swiss trains are unbelievably consistent but expensive. There’s a sweet spot that we should aim for.

It’s a public policy choice that any American town isn’t serviced by rail, even by shuttle. Density is irrelevant, but it’s the Shibboleth if we expect our trains to make money, rather than cost money as a service to Americans don’t want to drive, can’t drive, or literally any other reason. Take a look at the Italian and Swiss system maps. What you don’t see on these maps are the tiny, well-serviced stations between the larger stations there are hundreds of other stations.

Seriously.

No, seriously.

Some of these stations are stubs—not even connected by way of any other station—simply out and back. And these trains run relatively frequently; and punctually; and they’re extremely expensive. But if you want to get to Moosegg and you don’t want to hire a car, you can get to it. Train travel is so ubiquitous in Switzerland, that driving is often a last choice or a choice when traveling with a ton of equipment. The Swiss pay for this privilege.

Italian rail travel is punctuated with fits and starts. Travel within Italy is often more affordable than a similar-length journey in Switzerland, but there are landslides and planned labor strikes, sometimes at the same time. Culture is very different between the two countries. Let’s say that the Italians have a pliable relationship with punctuality overall; it’s a little ridiculous, really. But these two European countries have decided that it’s worth investing in, reinvesting in, and operating and maintaining a system that (mostly) works for its users. The trains eventually all arrive.

This can’t happen in the United States because there are often no trains planned at all.

Policy Implication: We have to decide as a country, through our elected representatives that we want train travel as a public good rather than a profit center(?). We can make rail travel safe and somewhat affordable. Yes, yes, the United States is much, much larger than Switzerland and Italy combined and we have thousands of towns to connect, but why not try at least connecting New York and Chicago via a journey that doesn’t take 18 hours, cost three times as much as flying, and is made so unpleasant by the constant fits and starts and fights with the oligopolistic freight rail companies, which, as we’ve seen do not care one bit about safety or the operations of passenger rail in the United States.

Likelihood of any change whatsoever in the next five years: 1%. Only because Andy Byford is at Amtrak. Without him: 0%.

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Lesson #4: Nationalize US rail operations, now.

We’re beholden to the handful of freight railroads that own almost all of the rail right-of-way in the United States. We’re also beholden to federalism, that old sass, which feeds power to the Federal government via authority vested in the states. The 10th Amendment to the Constitution, below, is simple in verse, but wickedly complicated in practice: overreach is often the word most associated with the unenumerated powers; the

else

exit.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The US has so much land and so much rail but the New York to Chicago trip will cross a minimum of five states, each of which has its own pernicious relationship with Amtrak, regional rail companies, and freight baddies. And the powers to build internal state rail are reserved to each state, unless otherwise mandated.

Ohio, one of the states required for this connection famously rejected rail money to connect Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland by rail: this rail corridor still doesn’t exist. Pennsylvania has an existing East-West route that routinely takes hours longer than scheduled. The on-time performance is dismal. Sort out the missing links and the delays, then there has to be an interstate pact among the five (likely six) states to agree on alignment and operations.

I’m oversimplifying this. Nationalize the rail system and enumerate these powers to the Federal government (please help us Amtrak?) and we can approach something of a cohesive system. Do we trust the beleaguered federally chartered corporation to sort this mess out? Time will tell.

The Left media loves this idea from a labor perspective. After 2022’s Ohio derailments and shifty mea culpas, I can see why. But I can’t seem to find a rational non-reactionary take on it. Or a process for how it would be done. I think it’s an interesting idea, but I’m not convinced.

Policy Implication: I’m torn between authorizing Amtrak with new powers and creating a competing/complementary corporation to organize the national rail system. I think Amtrak is too…tangled to sort out the planning and execution of a national rail plan. But more government is not the answer, either. Expecting Amtrak and the New National Rail to play nice over limited resources and to coordinate across assets is also a dead end. I think this takes more thinking than I have here. I’m out to lunch on it.

Likelihood of any change whatsoever in the next five years: 0%.

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Lesson #5: Transit does not need to be a culture war. American politics has made that impossible. We have to couple a clear vision with the resources to execute it and we must reverse the war on trains.

At some point in the past, but probably at many points, the private automobile became the dominant mode choice for American travelers. Not to be reductive, but some combination of price, ease of access, and the accompanying infrastructure to support both essentially decimated Americans’ desire for the shared mode inside cities and throughout metro regions. Our governments fund transit at a paltry pace to roadbuilding at some 1:4 ratio, though all in, I suspect this number is more like 1:5 or 1:6 (or more). Even if we had unlimited space (which we sort of do) for roads, we don’t have unlimited places—our cities and towns are established big and small. We’re bound by geometry and human behavior.

The two human, and perhaps one of which is uniquely American, behaviors are the need to capitalize on time; to rush because every dollar not earned is one lost, and that every decision is subject to side-taking and the culture war. Transit has been force-fed into the mobility guerre. Buses are for poor people; the subways are dangerous and scary. Unsurprisingly, transit is as othered as the people who use this option—where it exists—and it just doesn’t have to be. It can just be a part of the public benefits system we all pay for and use.

Nowhere else in the world do people campaign against mobility and choice—freedom to travel—as vehemently and also as little as possible. For a country with as many people as America does, we sure do hate investing in and moving as many people as possible.

In Europe transit just is. The people elect leaders who then work to build the right mode for the right situation. Sure there are anti-train people in the UK, but I don’t think they exist in Switzerland and if they do, they still take the train from stub to stub because it’s often the easiest way to get there. The third behavior.

My point, after now belaboring this for three-too-many paragraphs, is that we don’t have to continue making transit a culture war filled with mobility battles. But we will because it’s so deeply ingrained.

Policy Implication: Never one to advocate for a return to rational planning that got us into the predicament and bad comms situation we’re currently embroiled in, I think we do need to lean a little more on science and expert opinion. We need to find a way to decouple the prevailing doomscroll and bad faith takes from the reality of climate, the future of work, and the goddamn joy of travel we’re so desperate for. Congress should mandate a rethink of FTA’s role inside USDOT; with it comes the bevy of carrots and sticks to compel non-federal agencies to act with precision and communications fit for the modern mind.

Or, we just nationalize all of America’s transit (kidding).

Lesson #6: Story over everything, for better or worse.

I had an opportunity once to work on benefit-cost and fiscal impact analyses of a transit agency’s capital plan. A hundred or so projects, ranging from a complete bridge redevelopment to customer-service-oriented app design, dotted the list of activities this agency wanted to do over the next 15 years. There was a matrix of lifeless “scores,” given with logic but no life or reasoning that could easily be shared with the people paying for the service, the agency staff, and the consultants paid to make the chart. The scores were broken into 15 categories and were summed: the best projects scored around 200 and the “worst” around 50.

I have no idea how to interpret this beyond the idea of a modern listicle. It’s contextless; it’s boring.

On the other hand, the benefit-cost and fiscal impact numbers made sense. A project was “better” the more it returned to society—travel-time savings; safety savings; environmental savings—compared to its costs. A project was, in fact, better the less of a dent it made on the bottom line of the underfunded agency (see #5).

I’ve got to tell you, the benefit-cost analysis logic stands but what it measures doesn’t add up. Travel-time savings is reductive, sexist, and racist. Selling a reduction in carbon emissions is important, but it’s not particularly interesting. If carbon is “worth” $53/metric ton, and a project reduces carbon emissions by some thousands-of-metric tons, then, well you’ve got a calculation.

Who cares?

Transportation is supposed to serve the needs of a customer, and what a customer needs is safe, reliable, accessible, and affordable movement. All these numbers might make the number-crunchers happy—and the ability to compare relative strengths and weaknesses of projects across sectors, outputs, modes, etc. is useful. But without a strong narrative and story behind why any project matters, no one cares. At. All.

Economic impact modeling is dead. Long live economic impact modeling.

Policy Implication: Deemphasize hiding behind numbers and prioritize telling stories and gathering people to make sense of challenges. We tell the same nonsense over and over and over again and expect different results. Our transportation policy paradigm is the definition of insanity.

I’m not insane, just exasperated. Maybe a little insane.

Likelihood of any change whatsoever in the next five years: 0.1%. We need a complete rethink of how we talk about transportation in the United States. Secretary Buttigieg is steering the ship in the right direction, but his tenure is limited. Can we pick it up and start to look toward our friends across the Atlantic for hope?

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