Travel Thoughts: A More Privileged Version of “Shower Thoughts”
The end of an undergrad’s education in the United States is often very highly correlated with a summer in Europe, Asia, or pretty much any version of travel to any place other than home.
Not to be left out of this incredibly monumental, utterly unforgettable, and simply non-negotiable experience of a lifetime (coincidentally, all words I used to convince my parents that I, too, needed a vacation), I embarked on a 10 day trip throughout the Netherlands and Belgium.

In so many ways, travel allows for fleeting and frivolous thoughts that are so curiously intertwined with thoughts about the way our world works. Travel allows us to immerse in cultures that are unlike our own, and yet makes us feel at home in places quite far from it. These were all true of my trip.
I felt the drastic change in travel efficiency from the minute we landed in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, and used that as my anchoring topic of thought throughout my galavanting within the two countries.
17 minutes.
That’s all it took for us to travel from the airport in the outskirts of greater Amsterdam to the center of the city (about 19.7km or 12.24mi) by train. By car, this same trip could take anywhere from 25–40 minutes.
As a frequent traveler on the SF Muni and Caltrain systems, I am all-too-painfully aware of the feeling that comes with barely missing a train and having to wait 15–20 minutes for the next Muni or 45 minutes- 1 hour for the next Caltrain.
So what happened when we missed the train from the airport to the city?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing, because the next train headed to the city was 5 minutes after the one we had missed.
Well, okay, let’s suppose we write-off Amsterdam (and the Netherlands, as a whole) as an anomaly of superior and efficient transportation- a unicorn of mass transit, if you will.
Without the well-planned transportation infrastructure of Europe, how else was it possible that I could leave Amsterdam and be in this place

less than 100 minutes later?
Amsterdam Schiphol Airport -> Brussels-Midi (230 km or 142.915 mi) in 94 minutes.
I was a mixture of awestruck, grateful, and angered by the efficiency of train travel within Europe.
Awestruck and grateful that it had allowed me to conveniently and simply transit across two countries, and angered because I was now even more acutely aware of the gaping hole that the U.S. has left in its plans for mass transit and infrastructure.
On any given day, it takes me roughly 2 hours, door-to-door, to commute from my home in the South Bay Area to the office in FiDi, San Francisco (77.25 km or 48 mi).
And that’s with the “baby bullet” Caltrain, and adding good fortune for catching the Muni as it departs seconds before I breathlessly approach the platform with a pitiful look in my eyes.
It’s 2017. I live in the Silicon Valley, widely regarded as the hub of innovation.
But for some reason, while we have managed to create 7 (soon to be 8) versions of a smartphone, found ways to disrupt the taxi industry and hotel business, created a platform that made TV Guide obsolete, and built a social network, not many moves have been made to fix our archaic transportation system.
While companies like SpaceX and Elon Musk’s Hyperloop are up-and-coming in this area, it doesn’t explain how or why it took so long for anyone to give it a real thought.
The first high-speed rail was built in Europe in the 1990s, with China beginning HSR service in 2007. Since then both regions have significantly expanded and improved these systems.
In the United States, there is a current plan for a high-speed rail in California, with Phase I expected to be completed in 2029 (a good 12 years from now, but who’s counting?). By then, I wouldn’t be surprised if Europe had high-speed individual travel pods, China had hovercrafts, and California had called off the project entirely and accepted its fate.
But I didn’t write this so I could rant about how terribly behind the U.S. is in its efforts to connect the nation (okay, no, maybe I did a little).
I wrote this in the hopes that maybe the next person who’s thinking of founding a start-up that matches your facial structure to an animal and lets you share it with your friends via a multitude of social platforms, will think about ways we can solve this problem instead.
I know I already am.
