How Do You Like To Travel?

The world feels bigger when you consider multiple routes

I’m just back from last week’s Strong Towns National Gathering in Providence, Rhode Island. I went last year, when it was held in Cincinnati (and also to the co-located Congress for the New Urbanism conference in the same city, which I skipped this year, in part because of last year’s impressions and in part because it was a long time to be away right after a vacation).

I liked both Cincinnati and Providence. These guys do a good job of picking smaller, kind of middle-tier cities that aren’t talked about a lot, but which have a lot of history and character a bit of scrappiness or hunger—they feel like they want to grow and improve because they’re not quite there. I like that vibe a lot.

I’ll have more to say about the city and the conference, plus a bunch of photos I took, but today I’m thinking about transportation and travel. I opted for the pretty cheap and fast flight, from Washington Dulles to Providence’s tiny 22-gate airport, only 15 minutes from my downtown hotel. We flew on a little regional Embraer jet, which was actually more comfortable than our Boeing 777 we took home from Tokyo.

The airport had a small-town feel: there was a person on an intercom periodically calling travelers to retrieve a forgotten credit card from an airport store or move a car blocking the arrivals lane. I felt—with just one hour in the air, not much of a security line, no baggage to lug or check or retrieve (just a backpack), no customs—that flying was fun.

Without all those other things to grind down the experience, I was able to consider that I was just sitting on a plane for a quick ride, after which I could just leave. I rarely experience flying that way, and it was kind of refreshing to feel that little sense of the glamour and just…amazingness of air travel. This thing actually flies! It’s actually the safest method of transportation we have!

Certainly much safer than driving. I always want to road-trip to these conferences when I go to them once or twice a year. I think about how cool it would be to stop and see a bunch of places along the way. But I realize I’d probably get tired of driving more than a few hours, and realize that once you drag your car with you, there’s no way to get rid of it or out of it until you’re at your destination. And then you have to pay to park it at a downtown hotel. What feels like limitless freedom becomes a trap. Maybe it’s both. I like cars, but their usefulness is highly context-dependent.

I ran into a couple of D.C.-area urbanists I know from meetups and organizations down there, and that was nice because I didn’t know they were coming. Both of them, independently, opted to ride the Amtrak from Union Station up to the Providence station—about a seven-hour trip. And on average it costs more, especially for the high-speed Acela which is only about an hour faster.

But both of them enjoyed the leisure of the train, the lack of a security process, the ground-level view. There is a glamour to trains, but I wish you didn’t have to be a train enthusiast to ride the train. Unlike city transit, which often just makes sense even if it has some frequency/quality shortcomings, Amtrak is almost never competitive with flying unless you want to ride Amtrak. Which means it will never be competitive with the general public.