AirBnb can be really useful sometimes

In the past several years I've seen a number of posts attacking the company AirBnb, which is fine, but often they go further and attack the general concept of short-term housing rental outside of hotels. These posts have struck me as oblivious at best, and sometimes even callously indifferent. I rarely hear arguments in favor of short-term housing rental outside of travel industry promotion, so I wanted to give my entirely uncompensated argument for why I like them.

This is not an argument about the merits of AirBnb or any other company, or of tourism in general. It's about why short-term housing rental should be allowed wherever hotels, long-term rentals and vacation home ownership are allowed, and should not be restricted as a kludge to limit tourism overall.

I've stayed in plenty of hotels, inns, bed and breakfasts and youth hostels, and they can be great, but they're not always enough. Sometimes there simply are not enough hotels in a town, or a neighborhood.

Let's use the city of Northampton, Massachusetts as an example. There is exactly one hotel in downtown Northampton: the Hotel Northampton, a classic institution, almost a century old, with 106 rooms. That's a tiny amount for a small city with a college, a hospital and a large number of tourist attractions. There are at least two smaller hotels, three motels and a bed and breakfast within the city limits, as well as six across the river in Hadley and five in Amherst.

You could say that the people who can't afford the Hotel Northampton simply pay with longer trip times. That's not fair to begin with, but beyond that, only four of the other hotels are within a comfortable walk of the city center and Smith College. I believe they are all on bus routes, but those buses do not always run frequently, and there are some times when no buses run at all, such as early Sunday morning. Many of the motels, particularly in Hadley, are in areas that are dangerous and hostile to pedestrians.

Thus the price structure of the hotels discriminates against people who pay less, not just by imposing a time penalty and the cost of taxis when buses are not running, but by imposing a higher risk of death or injury.

If we look at AirBnb, there are rooms and apartments for rent near downtown, but they're available at rates comparable to the motels in Hadley, or even cheaper. No cost penalty, no time penalty, no car or taxi or extra bus trip required.

There are some towns that have no hotels at all. If someone wants to visit those towns, the only hotel may be miles away, with no transit at convenient times. But those towns may have a few short-term rentals where a visitor may even be able to arrive by transit and walk to their destinations.

Another benefit I've gotten from short term rentals is the experience of staying in a house or apartment that's integrated into a residential neighborhood. Sometimes it can be nice to stay in a hotel in a commercial or entertainment district, but those districts are often empty on weekends.

Many short-term rentals are in architecturally interesting places, and staying there overnight can give visitors a better opportunity to appreciate them. It can also allow visitors to live like locals in ways that hotels don't offer.

There are costs and risks to short term rentals. I don't want to dismiss them. I'm just frustrated with discussions of short term rentals that talk exclusively about the downsides without mentioning the reasons why people might choose them over hotels, or why they might even help people make trips that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

I'm often surprised when people don't mention these positive aspects. Have they never enjoyed staying in a quirky apartment in a quiet neighborhood and shopping with locals? Have they never been stuck in some shitty motel in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere, where they can't get to a restaurant without driving? Or paying through the nose to get snotty treatment from a stuck-up desk clerk at a downtown motel in an office district that's deserted on a Sunday night?

People bought COVID cars for access to recreation

Recently I wrote about the people who claimed to be "fleeing" the disease-ridden cities, but in actuality were in no more danger from COVID-19 in their urban apartments than in the exurban houses they moved to. I noted that there are probably less people "fleeing" the cities than there seem to be, as they tend to be well-connected and overrepresented in the media. They have added a lot to our greenhouse gas emissions on a per capita basis, but the damage they've done to our climate is probably more in having disrupted the return to walkable urban living that's been going on for the past twenty years or so.

Another group that has done damage is the people who stayed in the city (most of the time) but bought cars. This includes influential journalists like Baltimore resident and Earther staff writer Dharna Noor and New York Times City Hall bureau chief and former transit reporter Emma Fitzsimmons.

As with the people who "fled," there are probably nowhere near as many of these car buyers as you would think from the stories in the media. There was a surge of car purchases in the late spring of 2020, but this may simply be purchases that people would have made earlier but couldn't because of lockdown.

Those of us who care about the climate, or carnage, or energy waste, or inequality, should regard every vehicle purchase as a policy failure. In particular, those purchases that have happened in response to the COVID-19 pandemic point to a vulnerability in our strategy to reduce car travel. It is worth our time to examine what motivated people to buy cars and drive.

I would love to see a rigorous market survey, and if you know of any, please pass them on to me. In the absence of anything like that I'm going by what I've read in the news and on Twitter. Yes, Twitter isn't real life, and neither is the news, but this is to a large extent about the way we think about cars and transit, and how that affects our plans for the future.

Let's start with what these people didn't buy cars for: daily activities. I'm sure there are people - health care and food service workers - who bought cars to shorten their commutes, but I don't hear a lot about them. Everyone had access to basic daily shopping - as much as any of us. There were lines at some stores, but nobody went hungry because their local supermarket was closed.

When people give reasons for buying cars, what do you hear? Noor wrote eloquently about her experience, and what she says echoes what I heard from other people - those who bought cars during the pandemic, and those who already had them. Yes, her partner's work needs was what it took to outweigh everything she knew about the downside of cars, but here's what the car did for her:

I was no longer comfortable with my regular regional train rides to see my family members living outside the city. And during quarantine, living near the spots I frequented like the public library and my favorite local punk bar no longer seemed like a plus. I longed instead to be able to easily head to the H Mart about 10 miles (16 kilometers) west to mask up and buy bok choy or visit the big parks outside the city for hikes, but it was proving difficult to figure out how to do so.

What do you hear over and over again from drivers? What do you see on Facebook and Instagram? Recreation and shopping. People driving to parks and beaches. Driving to specialty stores, bulk clubs, ethnic restaurants. Driving to meet friends and visit relatives. Driving to hotels and AirBnbs.

As case counts dropped and capitalists started talking about "reopening" as early as the summer of 2020, people started using their cars for more daily tasks like commuting to work and bringing kids to camp and school. But to the extent the car boom of 2020 was a real thing, it wasn't driven by work and school trips.

In 2020, people bought cars for recreation. They may not have bought that many, but it was and is a public relations disaster for transit. And it was completely avoidable, both in the short term and the long term. We need to learn the lessons from that and avoid it in the future.

Long distance coaches should carry bikes

Someone got a bike on a Chinatown bus. Photo: Craig Lebowitz / Wikimedia.

A couple of years ago I was in Penn Station and heard an announcement about bustitution due to track work. The announcer informed us that the buses would not be able to accept bikes. Just the day before I had been talking with some people about cycling in Montreal. I haven't had a chance to experience it, because I haven't been there since before they rolled out the Bixi bike share. Years ago I had planned to bring my bike there on a visit, but there was bustitution and Amtrak informed me I wouldn't be allowed to take the bike on the substitute buses.

In many small cities, government-run local buses are equipped with a front rack that can hold two or three bicycles. But the policy of long distance, usually private, coach operators (at least in North America) is typically that they will only allow bikes to be stored in the cargo bins if they are in boxes, with the handlebars removed. Of course, it is very difficult for a bicycle rider to carry a box large enough to hold the bike, and removing and reattaching handlebars requires time, skill and specialized tools.

Why do they do this? It smells to me of that toxic combination of elitism and liability worries that makes it painful to interact with American corporations. The owners and executives of the coach companies don't take their own buses, and they don't ride bikes. They don't want to take bikes on the coaches: they take up a lot of space, it's time-consuming for the drivers, and they're afraid of being sued if the bikes get broken. Their lawyers said something about liability, so they made a rule: no bikes.

If we could get long distance coaches to accept bicycles in a convenient way, this could easily be used to extend the coach network, with a measurable benefit to the lives of people who don't own cars. When I was a teenager, I was essentially cut off from all the jobs at the local mall because it was five miles from the nearest coach station. The roads from the bus station to the mall were relatively friendly to bike riders, but the roads from my town to the bus station were not. This would also encourage people to take a coach for tourism.

I’ve seen a few blog posts by bike advocates in favor of racks on city buses, or space for bikes on trains. But I don’t recall ever seeing one in favor of convenient bike storage on long-distance coaches. Do you know any coach operators that carry bikes conveniently? Was there anything that overcame their objections and persuaded them to do this?

We still need more car-free weekenders

Some years ago, I wound up arguing about congestion pricing in my local cafe with a woman I’d never met before. I said that as someone who didn’t own a car I didn’t want to pay to maintain infrastructure for people who did. She responded with the usual, “Well, some of us have to have cars,” and then put a new spin on it. “I need one to get to my farm upstate.”

Photo: Daniel Case / Wikimedia

She clearly felt she had won the argument with that one, and I let her think that, because it was clear there was no getting through to her that evening. I grew up surrounded by farms, summer houses and weekend houses, and I can tell the difference between them. If you’re spending Sunday night in your apartment in Sunnyside, either you have a weekend house with a garden, or you own a farm but you’re paying other people to milk the cows and collect the eggs. Either way, you can leave your poseur pickup truck at the New Paltz park-and ride, and you are not entitled to my tax money subsidizing a free ride for you across the Queensboro Bridge.

Since then I’ve had similar encounters with other people, and read about many more, where someone who identified as a city resident argued in favor of maintaining free bridges, free parking, wide streets or minimum parking requirements, or opposing bus lanes or bike lanes, because they also identified as a driver. This person usually complained about owning a car in the city, either having to pay for parking or to move their car twice a week for alternate side sweeping. It seemed like they hated everything about car ownership.

The people in question didn’t use the car to commute to work, and rarely used it for shopping or to go out at night. So why did they have a car? To go to their country house (or sometimes “farm”) in the Catskills, in Vermont, in Connecticut. Sometimes they didn’t even own a country house, and just used the car to drive to short-term rentals or hotels.

It made me wonder, what if they didn’t need a car to have a weekend away from the city? What if, like me and my family, they took trains and buses to get to hotels? They could even own a house in a small town, walking distance from a bus stop or a train station.

I wrote about this back in 2009, and Alon thought we should concentrate our attention instead on getting suburbanites to move to the city. We see how well that worked out! But the reason I think it would be effective to provide more alternatives for car-free weekends is not based on absolute numbers. It’s based on the fact that so many people who are obstacles in the fight for safe streets, efficient movement, reducing pollution, bringing us closer together and providing access for everyone are people who own cars primarily to get to their country houses and weekend hotels.

If we can give those people an alternative to parking their cars in Manhattan, would they stop identifying as drivers and be more supportive of transit and walking? We can’t know until we try it. And as Bruce pointed out in the comments to my old post, the worst is that we can make it easier for a bunch of non-drivers to have a relaxing weekend away from the city. I’ll talk about some specific idea in future posts.

Visit Saint George!

Staten Island is home to beautiful parks, lovely architecture, tasty restaurants and fascinating museums. As Joby Jacob and I recently documented, on a warm sunny day thousands of tourists take the ferry to the island, getting a free harbor cruise. While there, they could grab a quick bite, explore the prewar architecture of the North Shore, or take a short bus ride to the museums of Snug Harbor. Instead, the vast majority catch the next boat back to Manhattan without ever setting foot outside the ferry terminal.



Some tourists play it safe, follow the herd, go where they're told or plan in advance. Those kinds of tourists will require more explicit marketing, which deserves its own post. Other tourists like to explore, and many of them do this already.

Part of the problem is that the design of the ferry terminal and the streets around it discourage exploration. The neighborhood by the ferry terminal, Saint George, is charming and walkable, and has been acknowledged by the New York City Economic Development Corporation as the most promising site for "the kind of vital downtown that has long eluded Staten Island." The terminal and the streets obscure the attractions of the area and make pedestrians feel unwelcome. Since tourists getting off the ferry are pedestrians, the design winds up making tourists feel unwelcome.

View from the roof deck

The problem begins with the elevation of the main passage of the ferry terminal. While the roof deck has a clear view of some interesting-looking buildings in Saint George, tourists are not guided up there. Instead they are confronted with a series of ramps leading up to bus platforms, a stairway down to the Staten Island Railway, and a stairway marked "Richmond Terrace." None of these provide a view of anything outside the terminal; the line of sight is blocked by stairs and canopies.

Some tourists find their way up the stairs to the walkway. It affords a decent view of Saint George, but it is mostly bare, exposed concrete with a minimal canopy protecting people from the elements. It is very wide right outside the terminal, but narrows to a twenty-foot sidewalk when crossing the SIR tracks before the intersection with Richmond Terrace. Half the width of this sidewalk is currently blocked by construction for the Staten Island Wheel and outlet mall project.

The intersection between the ferry terminal approach and Richmond Terrace is the third part of the problem. The walkway is now just a sidewalk for the Ferry Terminal Viaduct, four two-lane ramps carrying buses, cars, taxis and bikes over the Railway. The intersection is designed for the cars and buses, with slip lanes, recessed crosswalks and lots of extra asphalt. It is confusing and intimidating to pedestrians.

The fourth and final obstacle is the buildings that greet visitors leaving the ferry terminal: Staten Island Borough Hall, the Richmond County Courthouse and the Saint George branch of the New York Public Library. According to my AIA Guide they were all designed by Carrère and Hastings in the early twentieth century. I should rather say that they fail to greet visitors, because they all have turned their backs to the ferry.

The front entrance of the Richmond County Courthouse, permanently closed.

On one visit in 2014 I passed a troupe of thespians performing scenes from Shakespeare on the steps of Borough Hall, but this past Saturday Joby and I found the steps deserted, and the courthouse entrance permanently closed (without even any markings to indicate what it was). The handful of shops on the next block of Richmond Terrace were either closed or of no interest to tourists, or both.

A short walk around the corner showed us a different scene. Stuyvesant Place offered a variety of modest but inviting restaurants and shops. The courthouse has a fully functioning door on that side. So does Borough Hall - with parking for the Borough President and various high-level functionaries. The Library still presents a closed door to Stuyvesant Place, but you can walk around the block again and find a welcoming entrance, as well as the new Supreme Court building.

These buildings, shops and restaurants may not be things that every tourist would find interesting, but Joby and I saw a number of tourists who were tempted to stay on Staten Island for more than ten minutes. Many of them made it past the first two obstacles of lack of visibility and the exposed walkway (it was a warm Spring day), only to disappear at the intersection with Richmond Terrace.

I can easily imagine more tourists spending an hour or two in Saint George, New Brighton and Tompkinsville. We saw a number of storefronts that were either empty or closed on Saturday. It wouldn't take many more tourists to support a few more cafes and shops, which would in turn bring more tourists.

It would cost a lot to reconfigure the terminal so that arriving passengers can see the way to Saint George. It might not be worth spending that much right now, but we should talk about that when it comes time to redo the terminal for other reasons.

The walkway from the terminal to Richmond Terrace needs to be wider for its entire length, so that tourists never feel like second-class citizens, even if they are on foot on Staten Island. It needs to be better protected from sun, rain and wind, but also to be more interesting for tourists. A few signs advertising nearby attractions and businesses would help, but the city could also grant permits for vendors and buskers in the wider parts.

The intersection where the terminal viaduct meets Richmond Terrace needs to be reconfigured to be more welcoming to pedestrians. This is the kind of thing the DOT has done all over the other boroughs. They know how.

Finally, the institutions of Richmond Terrace - Borough Hall, the Courthouse, the Library and even the Post Office - need to turn around and welcome tourists. The Shakespeare performance I saw was a nice start, but the borough could do a lot more with that plaza. What about a Bryant Park-like cafe? Or the Supreme Court could rent the space inside its east facade to the Staten Island Museum, which is a block north on Stuyvesant Place.

Saint George is a pretty, walkable neighborhood just steps from the ferry. There is no good reason for eighty to ninety percent of people who arrive in the ferry to turn right around without leaving the terminal.

Visit Staten Island!

Staten Island offers lovely architecture, beautiful parks and fascinating museums. Thousands of tourists set foot on the island on warm sunny days. But as Joby Jacob and I discovered yesterday, there's a problem...

Civilized walks

Last week I wrote about two self-propelled travel memoirs, and how the travelers seem to have spent almost as much time being driven around as they did on the water or the trail. As I've written before, if I'm going for a walk I want to walk. I don't want to be driven to one trailhead and picked up at the other end. This is not some misplaced authenticity fetish: I know that even before cars, walkers got rides on horses and oxcarts and boats. It's just a matter of taste. I don't like being driven around. I find it infantilizing.

Here's the kind of "civilized walk" that these books make me long for: a long walk from one interesting place to another, taking several days. Ideally, it would run through a mixture of cities, suburbs, parks, countryside and small towns, with some long quiet stretches where I could walk for an hour or two without encountering too many people. It would have a comfortable indoor place to stay every night. Since I don't have the kind of connections that David Morine had, that means a room in a reasonably priced inn, hotel or bed and breakfast.

Photo: Rebecca Sudduth / Flickr.

A civilized walk would not require climbing mountains or crossing large wilderness areas, although it might be nice if there were optional side trails to do those things. It would not involve camping, lean-tos, youth hostels or couch surfing.

For me, a civilized walk would also not require being picked up or dropped off in anyone's car. It would not involve walking on the side of any busy roads or stroads. That means that the entire trip would be on car-free trails, sidepaths or sidewalks, with maybe a few short bits on small streets, country back roads and driveways. It also means that both ends of the walk would be accessible by transit.

You can also have civilized day walks that are transit-accessible at both ends, entirely on trails, sidepaths, sidewalks or pedestrian-priority streets. There are plenty of these in the greater New York area, but they've been covered, at least in part, so I won't focus on them.

I don't know how widely my preferences are shared. It's pretty clear that some people don't want to own cars, and just about everybody hates walking anywhere near a stroad. Beyond that, do other people feel as uncomfortable being driven around as I do? All those Appalachian Trail hikers don't seem to have a problem with it. Do other people mind walking down paved country roads where a drunken tourist might come around a corner at fifty miles an hour? It's not clear.

In future posts, I'm going to explore some of the possibilities for civilized walks like this. There are lots of incomplete options, and some promising leads, but I haven't found anything yet that really looks like it would work.

Walking in our National Parks

Chuck Marohn has a nice piece about the roads in our National Parks and how they provide a good template for "country roads" - a low-maintenance conduit for cars when there is not enough commerce for a street or enough long-distance travel need for a road. I like the general direction he's taking and I'll suggest some modifications in a future post, but first: National Parks. What a disaster.

I've only been to one of the prototypical National Parks in my life. I've also been to several National Monuments and other federally managed Parklike Things, and some urban historical sites that may be National Parks in some official sense, but I'm talking about the huge rural, remote, Western places with the RVs and the bears and enormous mountains and whatnot. Well, I went to one, and it wasn't all bad, but some parts were just bad.

It was many years ago, and I was living with the woman who is now my wife, in a Western city. We were having kind of a pain in the ass maintaining a carfree lifestyle, but we were managing. We both love walking in the woods and had heard nice things about Mesa Verde National Park, so one weekend we rented a car and headed out.

We both have driver's licenses, but my girlfriend didn't feel comfortable behind the wheel, so I did all the driving. After several hours of beautiful scenery with a stop for some hearty local food, we arrived at the park.

Only then did I find out that the park restaurant was twelve miles away from the campground, in the opposite direction from the park entrance. I didn't bring any food or cooking equipment, because we had planned to eat in the park restaurant. It didn't matter how exhausted and bleary-eyed and, well, dangerous I felt behind the wheel. We had to get in the car and I had to drive for another half hour. Then after dinner, I had to drive back another half hour.

The next morning, same thing: half an hour drive to get breakfast. And then another five mile drive from the park restaurant to the attractions. Finally, the attractions were all at least a few hundred feet apart. After a day of visiting the sites, it was the same thing in reverse. And then the next day I had to schlep us all the way home.

It was frustrating for me that there wasn't any kind of transit alternative. Even though the area around Mesa Verde is pretty low density, and the park itself is uninhabited outside of staff and visitors, the staff and visitors are actually clustered along a handful of roads. It would have been relatively simple to run a little shuttle from the park entrance to the campgrounds to the restaurant and so on. But the expectation is that everyone will drive, so everyone does.

I suppose we could have taken a bus tour, but I actually hate those things. You're not just tied to some bus schedule, you're tied to the schedule of a single bus, and wherever that bus goes you have to be on it. You can't decide to linger at one exhibit, or stay an extra day at the park, and catch the next bus.

I would have liked to simply get a bus (even if there's only one or two a day) to the park visitors' center, and then be able to walk to the campgrounds, the restaurants and most of the sites, and then have a shuttle bus to the other sites.

Now you may be saying, "Yeah, Cap'n, but this is the West. Everything's all spread out there. You have to drive." Yeah, I know that's been drilled into your head for years, but it's total bullshit. What's the big attraction on Mesa Verde?

Photo: Staplegunther / Wikipedia

The big attraction on Mesa Verde is a bunch of 800-year old apartment buildings. The people who lived there - ancestors of today's Pueblo, Navajo and Hispanic peoples ("Hispanic" having a very specific meaning in this area) - didn't have cars, or even wheeled vehicles. They didn't put their dining halls twelve miles away from their residences and five miles away from the other interesting things. They had walkable urbanism.

I believe that the other 57 National Parks don't focus on human history, and that the attractions in some of them may necessarily be more spread out. For some of them, walkability may simply not be practical. I also understand that when the bulk of the park was being laid out in the 1930s and 1940s, people were thinking of cars as the future. They wanted to build the parks for cars, and they did.

But even those parks are unable to deal with cars. You regularly hear about massive traffic jams, to the point where transit systems become viable. There are now six parks with frequent transit service: Acadia, Bryce Canyon, Denali, Grand Canyon, Sequoia and Yosemite. Arches National Park is thinking of joining them. Hot Springs is already in a walkable downtown.

Still, that's only eight parks out of 58. And that's why this cutesy "subway" map of National Parks put out by the Sierra Club pisses me off so much.

Walking down country lanes

This is an expanded version of a post from January 11, 2009.

In many parts of the world it's common for people to walk a lot. Sometimes they'll walk long distances - hours, days - to get where they need to go. It used to be pretty universal.

When I was younger I thought this just happened, that you could get up and start walking and just spend the night wherever you wound up. I was disappointed to discover, in Christopher Wren's Walking to Vermont for example, but also firsthand, that there are large sections of the country that are really very inhospitable to people on foot. To a large extent, it's because major roads have been built for cars with almost no thought to pedestrians. Outside of towns and cities, sidewalks are scarce, shoulders are narrow, and speeds are high. In some places, pedestrians are harassed, particularly outsiders.

My first reaction was to praise long-distance trail projects, like the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Coast Trail. Certainly, people do take long walks on these trails, and they're great for spending time in nature, getting exercise and seeing pretty mountains. But if you've ever hiked on them, you'll know that they're not very practical for actually getting anywhere. They usually don't go through population centers: Harper's Ferry, West Virginia is one of the few towns that are actually on the Appalachian Trail.

The first reason for that is that land in towns is expensive, and walking trails didn't provide a good return on investment for either private companies or governments to spend the money to develop them. The second is that they piggyback on existing trails, many of which were made for visiting mountaintops. While it's great for hikers to climb Bear Mountain on their way through the Hudson Valley, it's not really the most convenient route to get from, say, Peekskill to Middletown.

I then got interested in rail-trails like the Old Erie Path pictured above, and other linear parks like the Old Croton Aqueduct.  I love walking on these trails, but the rail-trails make me sad because they use infrastructure that could be used for trains.  Because of this, I get a bit disturbed by the intensity with which people cheer rail projects like the Walkway over the Hudson, the "Queensway" and the "Low Line."  It's clear that there's a real hunger for comfortable places to take long walks with nice views, and I don't want that hunger to eat up all the railbeds we have left.

I developed an interest in stories about people walking long distances, and looked for older ones that went back before all those roads were built and filled with cars.  Three that I can particularly recommend are Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World, Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, and Jerry Ellis's Walking to Canterbury. It turns out that in a lot of circumstances it wasn't much easier to get around on foot. There were weather problems, brigands, lack of food and difficulty finding or affording places to stay. There were also difficulties such as not having a good path to travel or losing the path.

One thing that's very striking about the more recent narratives is how many times the walkers get into cars, buses and trains. Especially cars. Five hundred years ago, if someone walked from Paris to Brussels they'd have had to walk from inn to inn, and once they left home they wouldn't see their families until they came back. Today, Appalachian trail hikers regularly hitch rides to grocery stores, or get visits from family members in cars. Just about every trail journal has an entry about getting a ride to a campsite further down the trail and then hitching another ride back to complete the skipped section.

What I learned from these stories is that walking too requires infrastructure. The paths and maps need to be created and maintained. There need to be bridges or boats to cross rivers and other obstacles. There need to be places to obtain food and places to stay, and they need to be affordable to walkers. This is a lot of work, and down through the ages it's something that people have spent years setting up. This infrastructure doesn't just happen.

It's actually quite a tragedy that country roads used to be places where people could walk, but with the number and speed of cars these days I wouldn't want to spend a month walking along them. When I was a kid I once visited coastal villages in Italy and Greece, and one thing that impressed me so much - impresses me to this day - is how they had well-maintained footpaths to other villages. I'm talking paths paved with stone, but too steep and narrow for cars. They were much more direct than the roads, because they didn't require all the hairpin turns. They weren't hiking trails or rail-trails or carriage roads. They were footpaths, built for people to get around.

In a recent Strong Towns podcast, Chuck Marohn talks a bit about country roads. He points out that most country roads used to be much narrower, and unpaved, which made it hard to travel at speeds above twenty miles per hour. And in fact, when I visited Africa several years ago, the road that a friend took me on would have been difficult for a four-wheel drive SUV, and much more so for an ordinary sedan. We never worried about a speeding car coming around the corner, because it was impossible for anyone to speed on that road.

Local governments across the country are facing budget problems, and Chuck argues that a big drain on the budget is the cost of maintaining all these wide, paved roads that serve a small number of travelers.  States across the country are already converting some low-traffic asphalt roads back to gravel to save money.   Beyond the cost savings, it'll be safer and more comfortable to walk on those gravel roads.  Hopefully that'll also satisfy our hunger for country walks, so that we can use the old rail lines for their original purpose.