The most overlooked part of transportation

Not all travel has to be boring.

A view of the Pacific Ocean from an Amtrak train in Southern California. Credit: Brandon

When I visit my family in suburban Ohio, I drive everywhere. It’s not always because things are farther away: My parents live within a mile of several stores, restaurants, even a movie theater.

Yet to walk would be unthinkable. That's largely because the environment in which to walk is so damn boring, marked by spaced-out homes, oversized parking lots, and heavily trafficked multi-lane roads. 

This conundrum reflects Jeff Speck’s General Theory of Walkability, laid out in his book Walkable City, which argues that for a walk to be favored it has to satisfy four main conditions: It must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting.

But in our suburban quest for space, we’ve swapped interest for efficiency, creating sprawling and boring environments with which to speed though.

• A trip to the grocery store is no longer an excuse to get outside, take a walk, or browse a bookstore on the way; it’s an errand that we are compelled to complete as fast as possible.

What if, however, a route was made so interesting that, despite how long it takes, it was worth the added time? Allow me to reintroduce the humble train.  

My Amtrak trip from San Diego to Seattle, with stop in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Portland.

I’ve made it a sort of annual tradition to plan a long train trip on Amtrak — the federally operated passenger rail service in the United States — previously taking the train from D.C. to Seattle, from Omaha to Salt Lake, and most recently, from San Diego to Seattle. In each case, traveling by train is unsurprisingly far slower than driving or flying. 

But what trains lack in speed they make up for in scenery, space, and the freedom to not be focused on the road like in a car or packed into a seat like on an airplane

The Coast Starlight train, which I rode this summer and runs from Los Angeles to Seattle, takes you alongside the Pacific Ocean shoreline, through dense forests and sparse valleys, and within sight of snow-covered mountain ranges. 

• Compare that with a plane that takes off and lands on the remote edges of cities, maybe offering a brief glimpse of the surroundings for five to 10 minutes before you’re above the clouds.  

Credit: X

Such trains also offer interesting conversations. Walking through the observation car on the Starlight, I spoke to a botanist from Oregon, a transportation engineer from Australia, a professor from Berkely, a pair of sisters from L.A., and a college student from Maryland. Each of them had their own reason for taking the Amtrak. But the common thread between them was always the experience of the train. 

Sure, such a mindset may be considered backwards, holding onto some nostalgic notion of slow transportation that fails to align with our capitalistic and American impulses to always go, go, go. 

• In that sense, I’m encouraged by some exciting developments in domestic high-speed trains and regional rail, as well as improved service on the much-traveled Northeast Corridor, all of which make Amtrak more convenient and comparable to other forms of transportation. 

But such upgrades are still years away. And in an era of climate change, when trains, especially electric ones, emit only a fraction of carbon pollution of a car or plane, train travel is worth reflecting on now. Plus, as work from home becomes a permanent reality for many, such trips don’t have to be a total timesuck either.  

Our preference to always fly or drive, treating transportation as a labor or a hurdle to jump as fast as possible, says a lot about how we’ve constructed society to ignore the very real costs of transportation (the sector accounts for the largest chunk of U.S. emissions) in favor of convenience. 

But we shouldn’t discount the redeeming parts of transportation either. As dads everywhere have been preaching for years, sometimes it’s better to take the scenic route.