2 Texans Down Under

Train service in Europe, as many of you know already, is wonderful. By the standards of most American cities, trains run frequently and reliably here in Brisbane and in other Australian cities, but the wait for a train in the Netherlands and Belgium, from which we’ve just returned, must average less than half the normal wait time here.

As Kristi said to friends of ours this morning, “You don’t even have to know train schedules. You just show up at the train station and you can be pretty sure there’ll be a train going where you want to go in a few minutes.”

Such high levels of train service, along with the predominance of bicycle travel in both the countries we visited, make us green with envy or, more exactly, envious of the “green” values manifested by the policy decisions of the Dutch and Belgians.

Given the great bus and subway/tram availability, too, getting around in much of Europe is easier than it is where we’ve spent most of our lives and, it turns out, better for health.

Population density, of course, is necessary for the economic viability of mass transit, but culture-wide expectations matter, too. There are plenty of places in car-dependent America with enough people to make train or trolley service feasible if people understood how much better off they’d be getting to work or school without jumping into their own cars.

Australia is no less car-dependent Read the rest of this entry »