Trains

 

Sometimes the problem with the world is the we evaluate it on a curve. If, for instance, all countries are bad (hey, I'm just throwing out the possibility), we might be inclined to think the best country is brilliant just because it is so much better than the worst country.

And so it is with transit.

It took me a long time to realise that there are no countries with good transit, and no cities with good transit or walkability. There are just badly put together places where it is better. 

I come from a country where transit is notoriously awful. And I increasingly visited places where the transit and walkability was much better. This excited me. This excited me so much that I even moved out of my own country to try living in one of these far better places.

But I was confused about the curve thing.

And when I got here I found that yes, it is way better here. With effort and time and money and sacrificing access to places one might want to go, one can live pretty well without a car. 

Compared to Saint Minneapolis, on a curve? It is great. 

It is absolutely brilliant!

But in reality?

Sorry dreamers.

Let's talk about Saorge, France, the one of a hundred most beautiful mountain villages of France that I have been showing you pictures of for days and days.

We took a train there. 

It was a marvel, as promised by the name of the train, the train of marvels. In fact, it was a lot like what I thought exploring France by train might be like; a train with pretty windows going from tiny interesting town to tiny interesting town until it can't go any farther, gives up, and comes back to where it started.

But sadly the train to Saorge is the exception and not the rule. Indeed, it is pretty much one of a kind. There could be a vastly more train lines just like it but there aren't. If we were to measure say 100 kilometers from where I am now, in every direction (discounting the half of it that just goes out into the sea), so something like an hour and a half drive then, we could find literally hundreds of darling villages and small towns that would easily charm you and me both. I went and looked on a map to make sure I wasn't exaggerating. It is insane out there! I literally could pick any place name showing on my map, out in Provence and the Maritime Alps, do a street view, and melt my heart on the spot.

And how many can I get to by train?

Maybe one percent, with a good walk and/or a lucky bus.

How many could I visit by bus?

Maybe a few more if I were willing to travel all day and sit at a series of ugly roadside stops for one to three hours, both ways.

How many can I get to by car?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Well,  so by fortune and wonder one can take the train to Saorge. But you still have to walk up a mostly sidewalkless road (a narrow one in the tunnel) for twenty minutes to get there. At least there's mostly no cars in the town.

On a French curve? 

Paradise.

Fine.

Menton for good and ill

 

Here is a picture from Menton's citrus festival:

I have real pictures too. And maybe I'll even show them to you.

 They're...

fine.

And so is the citrus festival.

And so is Menton.

Actually, Menton is kind of great and horrible. Gorgeous ocean, magnificent old town scoring probably as high as an eight on the Seussian Scale of old towns. The shops, bakeries, and restaurants look pretty nice, though after several months around here I've come to recognize sadly how many of them are chains, even if they're maybe more local chains than international ones, but plenty of those international ones too. And when one comes to a pedestrianized street, almost exclusively leading into and through the old town, it really is a lovely place. There is absolutely nothing like it in the country I come from.

And then, unavoidably, are the roads. 

Where the citrus festival centers, it is along a kind of parkway center between two streets that they apparently couldn't bear to close entirely off, a kind of grand boulevard ruined for any real use by its devotion to traffic. The ocean too, of course, is lined by a road with its unholy roar of cars, buses, and motorcycles racing urgently along it, and though there are a number of lovely squares and sidewalk restaurants, a big road full of traffic always seems just around the corner, like there's this pretty little city for tourists, mixed artfully in, but the real city is a working city for suburbanites, a... Dubuque Iowa.

I believe this has seeped into the very soul of Menton and is expressed in the magnificent citrus festival displays themselves. A lion, giraffes, a woman, pelicans, parrots, these giant magnificent sculptures are entirely made out of citrus fruits, mainly oranges and lemons, until one gets to, like, the important parts; the giraffes' heads, the woman's face, the paws of the lion, and the head of the parrot, and then, all of a sudden, they are no longer made of fruit, they're plaster, or fiberglass, or whatever is usually used for giant cast figures like that. And it's not bad. It's so not bad we're all willing to overlook it, 

but, let's not lie...

It's not quite amazing, is it?

And neither is Menton.

On the cost of trains

 

We made the hilarious mistake of moving to Saint Minneapolis in 1991 because we heard they had a good transit system there.

Though fairly broke in our youth, we nevertheless had a car within a month or two of moving. Over the next 30 years they made many improvements there, including trams, bike routes, and dedicated buses. It is still horrible and yet I'm sure many a young innocent is being lured there even now to ride on slow trams with starry eyed idealists, psychologically troubled drug addicts, and people whose license was confiscated. 

And that's the thing really, transit is so absolutely shitty every single place in the world (yes, I have now been now to Kyoto, Tokyo, Copenhagen, and Paris, all places sited in one way or another for their excellent transit) that it gets graded on a curve instead of on its own merits. Even the most fervent urbanists and anti car activists are so skewed by a lopsided status quo that they can hardly see the merits (and demerits) of a place accurately. I understand, when everywhere is a mess of relentless toxic traffic, one wants to sing the merits of, I don't, Amsterdam. Venice? 

In the village of the blind...

And so we were, alas, maybe a little too taken in by the glorious transit of France.

We moved to France because we heard they had a good transit system!

Fool me once...

Our little town here is right on the coastal train line. What a boon! Trains race by all the time! 

And then we tried to ride one.

It doesn't stop here very often. You have to use an app to even get a ticket and, though I have mastered this process by now, I find it all wildly over formalized and inconvenient. 

And it costs a lot.

What should a train cost?

In the days when we were often going to Cannes, maybe eight miles away, we switched over from the trains to a bus that comes hourly. The bus, less pleasant I suppose, still came infrequently, hourly, but at least without being so inclined to take 3 hour breaks in its schedule, effectively stranding the unprepared. Also the bus was a quarter the cost.

A quarter the cost for a bus?

I have a pointed question to ponder, that, while a genuine question, does carry a bitter distrust about what and how a culture subsidizes things:

Why or how could a bus ever be cheaper than a train?

Missing Japan

 

Here we are on the Cote D'Azur and it is amazing. The moon is shimmering off the bay of Cannes out our windows right now, and I can hear the waves breaking on the shore in the chilly, but never freezing, night. 

But we want to live here, and in this pursuit the seams start to show in the fabric of the magic of this place.

There are many stunning and enchanting places here in France, but it turns out there are even more people who want to live in and visit those places. And since nowhere near to everyone who wants to can, people live nearby the amazing places. One might think these nearby places would be nearly as amazing, but they aren't. Things take a sometimes hard drop off from the amazing places. The amazing places are the European wonderlands anyone might love. But the other part of France nextdoor is rather more American than we might have hoped, with its relentless car infrastructure, weird sprawl, and separation of vital and interesting shopping areas from the places people live.

It always confused me how, even in the USA, there could be areas of great population density, clusters of apartment buildings and packed in housing, that existed in areas with few shops or services. Occasionally we would run into these mystifying areas in Europe too, only briefly as we were on vacation, and perhaps I too easily dismissed them. Maybe I thought that was simply the way a city had to be. And though Europe had more of the wonderful, rich places of beauty, pedestrianization, and unique business and design that everyone wanted to be in, it was still true that places like Nice and Rome have neighborhood streets of thousands of people, in not inexpensive apartments eight stories high, hosting nothing along their long avenues but a couple boarded up businesses and a hairdresser or two.

There are always the hairdressers.

And then we went to Japan.

And it just wasn't like that.

And I miss Japan.

A few words on mass transit

 

With a deep interest in urbanism, anarchist utopias, and cities, and having moved to France not least to find somewhere my dear wife and I can live functionally without a car, and having spent something approaching two months living in Tokyo, Kyoto, and the Cote D' Azur, I have a lot of thoughts and new experiences in how cities can work, and where they're still hopelessly stuck to their detriment. Maybe I will manage to delve into this subject more deeply, but today I am going to limit myself to a what will mostly be a few reflections on buses.

It might be a bit of a screed.

Kyoto was a city like nothing I've ever been to. It is jammed with people, commercially vibrant in a way I have never seen- where businesses genuinely exist in relation to where people live (in a way that I had long been wondering why the world wasn't more like. Even a place like Nice has blocks of eight story apartments in sections of town full of dead space and no commercial activity). Loads of people rode buses and trains in Kyoto even though the trains were a bit incoherent and incomplete, being operated by different lines and companies, and not really covering the city fully, and the buses, almost always packed full, and reasonably frequent, were jammed into the city's car traffic without much respect or care. It was a better system than possibly any place I've ever been to, and on a curve it gets top marks. But what a curve! We are so inured to cities slavishly devoted to the automobile that even cities like Tokyo or Kyoto, still assigning vast resources and privelege to cars and roads for cars, come off by comparison like they're fucking Venice!

Not that Venice doesn't have a few problems.

But the streets aren't one of them.

But I promised just a couple things about the buses, though it applies to trains as well, and it can really just be this one thing, a simple measure with which to understand at least an aspect of any city:

If your city buses (or trains) are jam packed, you aren't running them often enough.

We could live in paradise

Fishing around in the recent history of clerkmanifesto I came upon my recent series where I was making the case that any city was improved by replacing its roads with canals. In my mini doctoral thesis I set the bar at a level I thought was pretty high for myself: I explored already lovely cities like Paris, Nice, Rome, and Kyoto, and coldly tested them. Were they actually better with canals?

They were.

But briefly looking them over I wondered if there wasn't more to explore in my thesis. Yes, an already beautiful city can be made even more beautiful if we get rid of cars and even roads, but what about an ugly city?

I live in Saint Minneapolis. I like it very much here. There are many lovely places here, and I have even documented some of them in this very space. The urbanist channels I follow regularly extoll Saint Minneapolis and their points are excellent. Saint Minneapolis is constantly regarded as one of the best biking cities in the country. And I'm sure it is. There is a good case to be made that it is one of the best urban areas in our entire country!

That said, and with all due city loyalty, I have to admit:

Saint Minneapolis is a pile of hot garbage. 

Relative to the rest of the country it may be better hot garbage. Though that's pretty sad. Relative to a nice European city it is just simple hot garbage. And relative to a reasonably unfettered "Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" imagination of hope and light, it is a shining beacon of cruelty and injustice.

But I am not here to get into all that.

I just thought: There are some really ugly wide streets all over my city. Could they be improved by canals?

And then I went to steal pictures from Streetview of nearby areas that I regularly visit and am familiar with and know to be pretty ugly. But opening up Streetview, it was worse than I thought! I have dealt with up to five lanes of brutal traffic running through all the commercial areas I enjoy for so long that I think I have learned to partly tune them out. I know that Snelling Ave. and Lake St. are miserable roads hostile to aesthetics and human experience, but I am pretty good at looking the other way. That's where the coffee shops are. That's a place to walk to. That's where I live. So I learn to tune it out more that I would imagine.

What I'm saying is: these Streetview images were shockingly ugly. The small line of nice shops, or the useful trees, or the library building, were like ten percent of the scene. The roads, parking lots, and cars took up like half of any image. Did I think simply putting in a canal here could improve this mess?

Well, my plan was to try.

So I got rid of cars, and parking lots, and put in a canal. And...

Ah civilization. It really is that simple.

My point is made again.

 

Homeless

 

My lovely wife and I went out walking in our city. At some late point we stopped and had a prosecco sitting at a metal table on a sidewalk next to a busy street. It was lovely and unpleasant, which I found confusing. The sidewalks were full of life. People walked by. Parents rode along with bikes jimmied together with giant buckets carrying their children. Couples dated. A man came along eating an ice cream sandwiched in two cookies, which is a specialty of a nearby eatery. People picked up pizzas, went desperately looking for their dog that ran away, and biked happily along until, and this is where we come to it, someone honked at them and nearly killed them with their car.

Yes, bisecting in the most savage way, a city of life and humanity, were two massive streets, four lanes or more wide, with loud, fast, polluting cars racing by. It was like there was a nice city trying to claw its way out from ugly and dangerous design and... not quite making it.

There is a cartoon I once saw, maybe a little famous in the Urbanist community, where the streets are not removed, rather they are simply deadly abysses, a perilous drop. People cling to the little ledges of sidewalks and, crossing the street is done on narrow planks. I love that cartoon, but also don't feel it does it quite justice; the normality of the streets everywhere, their sense of danger and carefully ordered alienness to a person on foot.

But we drank. We walked along on a warm summer night. And the whole time we talked about where to live.

And never came to an answer.

Venice: I can't drive through

 

A couple days ago we featured some pictures that diabolically reimagined Venice, Italy with its canals paved over for the convenience of cars. While evil in design, and meant as the darkest critique, we nevertheless found it fun to make.

So we tried our hand at a music video of it all.

It is a little more on the comical side of the equation, but I think it's in the spirit.

I hope you enjoy it and find it catchy!

The canals of Paris

 

As I continue to prove my thesis that cities without cars, and where the roads are replaced by canals, are all improved, I find I may have wandered beyond my expiration date. While my demonstration yesterday of Venice with roads instead of canals was extremely convincing, I find in looking over my previous cities of Nice, Rome, and Kyoto, my argument is damaged by a few of my penchants.

1. The lack of people make the cities look like the victims of post apocalyptic floods more than the beneficiary of delightful urban renewal.

2. Lack of ground access to buildings makes it look challenging to get around.

3. Heavy focus on already charming alleys, some of which are almost car free anyway, soften my point.

So with all this in mind I am taking my campaign to Paris, France. I may still suffer some of the flaws from the list above, but I am improving.

Is Paris better with canals?

Do I just like canals?

Has my thesis wandered off the map?

These questions and more will surely be answered today and in the weeks to come!