Last week was our spring break, which we spent in Germany visiting relatives. It was one of those trips I deride others for making—we spent almost as much time on planes and in airports as we did actually visiting—but we were fulfilling family obligations and were working within a limited window. We did manage to take a little side-trip by train to Hannover to visit an old friend of Sylvia's, and I was struck yet again by the difference between Germany's rail network and our own. In Germany, one feels that one can get almost anywhere by train, stations are central and easy to access, and tickets are relatively inexpensive (we used the Niedersachsen-Ticket for our trip: 26€ [approx. $35] for the entire family any distance within Lower Saxony, including Hamburg and Bremen). America is big and things are spread out, but even in a dense commuter corridor like the northeast, I've found trains to be inconvenient and severely limited. Getting to Manhattan from where my parents live in South Jersey necessitates driving into downtown Philadelphia (to catch Amtrak) or driving almost halfway to New York and catching a commuter train from an outer suburb like New Brunswick. Of course, there's more to this issue than just the rails. Trains thrive on concentrated urban centers, which have been diluted or even excised from many of our cities and towns by half a century or more of automobiles' primacy in America. I don't think we could adopt a public transport approach in many places even if we wanted to. And of course, outside of pinko tree-huggers like myself, we don't want to. So we'll keep our cars and drive off into a sunset of traffic jams, suburban sprawl, and lifeless downtowns.