Orange pilled: next steps

I really like the urbanist movement surround Not just bikes and Strong Towns, and I’m starting to see something of a mature phase emerging. A few years ago these sorts of things were just fawning over Europe, now more people are starting to realize the urbanism and infrastructure here can be pretty terrible. It’s not enough to gloat about being marginally better than the US.

Threads like this Reddit discussion about inter-country EU trains are becoming more common. I hope this leads to more and better trains.

From Amsterdam, the furthest one can reasonably go via train is Paris, London or Berlin. Even in these cases, it’s often cheaper to fly or impossible to book last minute tickets.

With Japanese railway speeds, the right subsidies (yes, short-haul flights should be penalized because of the massive externalities they generate) and logistics, the six-hour travel window from Amsterdam could be Warsaw, Vienna and Marseille. Overnight trains would make Spain, Italy and Scandinavia reasonable destinations.

But it’s become something of sola fide religion among Eurocrats to talk about “the energy crisis” and “carbon emissions” while not enacting any policies that would help either.