A brief rest day recap turned ramble:

A couple of days ago Ethan and I took the train to Geneva for the day. The trip was fast and stress-free given Switzerland’s amazing train system, and once there, getting around without car or cab would have been super easy too. For simplicity’s sake, we opted to walk, but we could have easily joined the rest of the city and got around by riding trains, busses, bikes, or scooters.
Unlike New York or Paris or something, Geneva isn’t nearly a big enough city to mandate such awesome public transportation (I think it’s way smaller than Colorado Springs). For whatever reason though (higher population density? Better foresight? Excess money?), Geneva has built such a seamless public transportation system that owning a car just wouldn’t be practical, and this seems to be the case in most of the European cities that I’ve visited.

Not owning a car strikes me as so novel and cool because it's such a necessity for most Americans, both socially and practically. A guy without a car is pretty much the stereotypical doomed bachelor (think 40-Year-Old Virgin). Can you imagine a hotshot American attorney stepping out of his high-rise office, tucking his suit legs into his socks and pedaling his bicycle home? No way in the US, but it’s common here. Even in supposed conscientious Boulder, where public transportation is relatively great compared to most other US cities, the bus system is mostly reserved for pimply high-school freshmen.

It’s like the question of the chicken and the egg; I don’t know whether Americans first became addicted to cars and then cities were built around them, or whether cities were so catered to cars that an addiction was inevitable. Probably neither, or both, but whatever. For some reason, aside from the devout environmentalists and those fortunate enough to have the luxury/health/infrastructure to get to work without a car, Americans just don’t have many alternatives. I face it myself—there is no practical way for me to get from Colorado Springs to Boulder without a car (excluding a cab, which is not the point).

This leads to all kinds of questions regarding energy independence, global warming, etc. etc. etc., to which neither I, nor anyone else for that matter, has any real answers. Undoubtedly though, oil will run out, and therefore the US will eventually run without it. It has to. After visiting Geneva, I think Europe was lucky not have the rise of the automobile coincide with the building of their cities--their adaptation to an oil-free world will likely be less apocalyptic than America’s. On second thought though, maybe the world is small enough that we’ll all be hit pretty hard. This placard at the Geneva Museum of Modern Art thinks so. I’m not sure how I feel about it and will reserve comment, but thought it might be a cheerful note on which to end this odd post.