Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

I was riding in a train in England and I happened to mention to a woman sitting next to me how wonderful I thought the English trains were. (That goes for buses too.) She asked me what we did for travel in America, and then answered her own question — we drive everywhere. No choice, I told her.

These couple of photos ought to give you an idea of the difference between our crumby so-called transportation system and a system of buses and trains designed for a country where people are used to taking public transportaiton — and where gasoline is $8 a gallon

Note the inside of this very typical bus. Perhaps you can see that it is (gasp) comfortable. The indistinguishable red things in the front are a digital clock. The seats are fabric, not hard plastic, and they are neither slashed nor dirty nor defaced with graffiti.

I’m not painting an unrealistic, rose-tinted picture here. The train stations aren’t brand-new and spanking clean. They have been in operation a long, long time. But they aren’t covered with graffiti either, nor with litter.

And do you know what this is? It’s a train! You know, those things that used to travel along steel rails, carrying passengers, and not just freight, from one city to another. Only, unlike American trains, these more or less keep their schedules to the minute. They go frequently to where you want to go. They interconnect with each other so that by changing trains when necessary you could go from one end of the country to the other. And where the trains don’t go, the buses do — and you can buy a combination ticket that will let you ride on each successively.

Amazing, ain’t it? Maybe when we grow up we’ll have such things too. In the meantime — back behind the wheel! A friend of mine used to say that America is the only country in the world where a poor man has to own an automobile whether he wants one or not.