Ever been to Padova?
It's just this smaller-sized city in the Veneto in the northeast of Italy, a few miles inland from Venice. It's known as a cheaper alternative to spending the night in Venice itself ... and it has some fairly significant attractions of its own, including one of Italy's most precious art treasures, a radiant cycle of Medieval frescoes by Giotto in the so-called Capella degli Scrovegni.
Anyway.
I found myself reading the Wikipedia entry on Padova the other day, doing a bit of travel-minded day-dreaming. Pretty dry article, mostly statistics ... and statistics ... and ...
WTF?!?!
In the part of the article where it talks about transportation in the city, I learned that the Padova train stations are served by 450 trains per day.
That's four-hundred fifty freaking trains every day.
And Padova is a smaller city, only 215,000 people.
Yet, every day, there are on average 450 trains -- local, regional and express -- communicating travelers in and out of the central and suburban stations. That's about one train, every three minutes, going somewhere.
The Italian train system is a bit of a wonder. I've never found the schedules to be too accurate, except on the new, high-speed luxury-class Eurostar lines that connect all of the major cities now.
But Christ Almighty, there are connections coming and going all day long to anywhere you want to go from anywhere you might already be.
When the trains come so frequently, who really cares if one is late or goes out of service or whatever? If you miss one train, get on the next. There is always another one coming in a few minutes.
So, here is my question:
Can anyone name a single U.S. city of 215,000 people that is served by 450 daily trains? My guess is that only New York City, of all cities in this country, has rail access at this level.
Crikey, we have a lot of catching up to do. Our cities and towns are massively underserved by critical transportation infrastructure that is inline with what we might expect, as far as energy availability, in coming decades.
If they can do it in Old World, ancient, tired Socialist Italy, why can't we do it in the brave new America?
And it's not just in transportation that we've lagged behind. Where are our nation-wide ultra-high speed broadband data networks? If South Korea can have this, why can't we? What the Hell we been spending our money on? Where is our best-of-class health care system? Where is the alternative energy infrastructure of tomorrow?
Jeez, guys ... We're falling behind.
And not only is Padova served by 450 trains a day, they plan to add another 150 daily lines of service by 2010. How many new trains can you expect per day in your town?