To introduce myself, I'm Daniel (going by the username "dancvg" here). I'm heavily interested in trains, and public transportation in general, and am currently a 2nd year engineering student at Purdue University, hence the blog name "Boiler Railfan". I started this blog as a place to keep my various thoughts about trains, transit, and urbanism straight, and share them with the greater community. I'll mostly be writing about transit in the context of the US or Canada, or East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan), as those are the two regions of the world I know the most about, but I will occasionally mention examples from other parts of the world as well. New articles will be posted whenever I feel like it.
In my time spent discussing trains and transit with other people, specifically on Reddit and Discord, it is inevitable that the topic of discouraging car usage and encouraging transit usage is brought up. There are people on both extreme sides of the debate, one extreme wanting to remove all cars and roads from existence to make transit work, and another claiming that trains are "communist". My opinion is somewhere in between. I think that cars and highways are an overall positive to the economy as a whole but forcing everyone to basically be dependent on them just to go anywhere is one of the worst things that happened to America post-WW2.
What is "car dependency", anyways?
Car dependency is when the built infrastructure heavily favors people driving everywhere and discourages all other modes of transit, with walking, biking and transit infrastructure in car-dependent areas either being nonexistent, or crappy at best. Most post-WW2 American suburbs fit in this category, with common features including residential areas with winding roads and cul-de-sacs, wide arterial roads, and big-box stores and office buildings set back from roads by a sea of parking. All of this comes with a lack of density in the suburbs, which isn't ideal at all when planning a new rail line for a metropolitan area.
When I first got interested in urban rail systems, I couldn't place a finger on why American rail systems outside of cities in the Northeast Corridor work as well as similarly sized cities overseas. This led me down the rabbit hole of understanding more about things that make transit work, from articles online and YouTube channels like Not Just Bikes and RMTransit.
Liking cars while hating car dependency
A lot of people I've talked to think that liking cars and car dependency is mutually exclusive; you have to like both or hate both. That is totally not the case. Personally, I'm a car fan that despises car-dependent infrastructure. I like driving, but mostly on rural and scenic roadways. And other car enjoyers I've met enjoy them for motorsports. It's miserable being forced to drive in traffic to get somewhere with no other viable alternatives to get there.
There are a lot of other countries with lots of road infrastructure and high car ownership, but its people aren't dependent on their cars to get around as there are plenty of efficient alternative methods to get around. The Netherlands and Japan are two such examples. Despite their wide roads in some places and high car ownership, they also have two of the best rail systems in the world. And of course, the Netherlands is also well-known for its biking culture and infrastructure. They prove that unlike what some people think, you don't have to displace all cars to make alternative modes like biking and public transit work.
Conclusion
This wraps up my introduction and my first thoughts to get everything started on this blog. As for future posts, I'm thinking of doing a couple of series, including
- "Transit Spotlight", where I explain a city's rail system and what makes it great.
- One where I post fictional transit maps for cities
- General ideas for improving transit (and pedestrian/bike infra to some extent)
- Rambling on about whatever I have in mind
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