The Glories of Mass Transit

It may very well be that Richard Wagner was wrong; the most important activity in human life, I begin to feel, is not creating art, but rather transit—getting from one place to another. Whether you’re destroying your shoes, feet, and legs by walking everywhere, or destroying the planet by using fossil fuels to propel your transportative vehicle, this is the big one—we need to do it (especially we travelers) and we haven’t yet figured out the best way. We have lots of ways to travel! I’ve taken many so far on this very trip, including:

Air Travel. I flew from Seattle to Copenhagen. Obviously, I didn’t do it in a balloon, as in the picture, but rather took a very comfortable SAS flight over northern Canada and Greenland. The ballon was flying over Dresden when I went out for a walk last night, and I just couldn’t resist—I did get to watch the movie Casanova again, while on that very SAS flight, and although in the end I was glad I hadn’t shelled out $25 for a DVD when it first came out (it’ll get cheaper later on) that was an awesome sequence where Heath Ledger takes his girlfriend up for a balloon ride until she figures out he’s really Casanova and they come crashing to the ground and he gets arrested by the Inquisition.

Boats. We took lots of boat rides while in Denmark; another picture, here, of the Scandline ferry, which get you off of Scandanavia and onto the rest of Europe. I think it was a Scandlines boat that Stephen Sprenger and I took from Hoek van Holland to Harwich a couple of years ago, across the North Sea.

Trains. The real glory of traveling in Europe, of course, are the trains, whether S-Bahn (like in the picture, Berlin’s above-ground metro system) or U-Bahn (the underground metro trains, although all of them go above and below ground back and forth) or real train-type-trains, like the ICE which barrels across the countryside at alarming speeds. I love traveling by train, I just love it. So good for people-watching!

Bus. Usually the bus is a second best alternative to the train; certainly in Seattle I resisted participating in our metro system for many years, and finally gave in because I had gotten rid of my car and had no other choice. I’ve had nevery nice adventures here so far, taking buses in Copenhagen, Berlin, and Dresden.

Tram. In Dresden the entire city is criss-crossed by these little tracks, which are something between a train and a bus. In San Francisco they call ‘em ‘light-rail’, and perhaps one day we’ll see such a thing in Seattle. But I’m not holding my breath...

Cars. I don’t much care for cars, I’ve discovered over the years. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that the automobile is responsible for what's wrong with America today. I don't know about Germany. The Germans love cars(this picture comes from a weird ‘fancy-car-design-store’ we passed the other night). I’ve really only taken two car rides so far, both taxis to and from the Dresden Train Station, which was too far to walk, even to a bus/tram stop.

Bicycle. By far the most energy-efficient form of transportation yet designed by man, and it works great in most of the cities I’ve been to so far because they’re all flat. This picture is taken in Copenhagen, on Frederiksborggade near where I stayed; you see the commuters heading to work in the morning on their special bike lanes. I only ended up getting a bike out for about an hour so far; it was in Copenhagen, where they have these ‘city bikes’, nasty free bikes theoretically placed all over the city, and (for the refundable deposit of 20 DKK, about $3) you can take one from one rack, ride across town, and replace it in another. I did so Sunday morning, and discovered that this system doesn’t really work, because most of the bikes were stolen when the system was invented ten years ago; I looked 45 minutes to find a working bike, by which time I could have walked to my destination and back. The bike I ended up with was so nasty, by the time I had gotten to Lagehuset and got my Danish, I biked back only as far as the subway station and took the train the rest of the way. Now—if only I’d had my OWN bike!