I’ve been to France and other European countries, and also to Boston, NYC, and Washington D.C. The Paris Metro is certainly my idea of the model of an urban metro. It has a station every 4 or 5 blocks, and is clean, beautiful, and even fun.

Boston, as you say is an important miss.

Heck, I went to a conference in Seoul, Korea a couple years ago, and that former dirt-road town now looks like Manhattan, including an NYC-scale subway system. The Koreans are very in love with cars, since they now are a major maker, but you get the point. In the USA, our “leaders” want us to believe that it’s impossible to rebuild our cities, despite examples like Seoul.

Another thing that fascinates me is the issue of what Europeans might do as a reaction to peak oil. If you look at those French transportation statistics, you see that even the French are spending huge amounts on cars and roads, over and above the SNCF system. Excuse my French, but what the fuck for?

How are things in BeNeLux? The reportage I’ve seen is that it’s a real hotspot on this issue…

Peace!

Last month I was in Boston for the first time (we live in Luxembourg, but we took our 7-year-old daughter to vacation in the US for the first time, so she could see for herself the country that issued her passport. I hadn’t been there in almost 9 years. Talk about suddenly dropping the frog into water that has been slowly rising to a boil!), and I was admiring their subway system, a public transportation system that’s way better than what most U.S. cities have (mostly nothing), but still laughably short of what it COULD have been, everywhere always dirty and occasional bits sometimes broken, and I was thinking a very similar thought: “Imagine what this could be like if they had spent money on THIS instead of on cars and streets and so on!”