Since arriving at Munich for the ‘Engineering the German Way’ study abroad, one thing has really hit me like a… a train. I swear I didn’t mean to do that.
The public transport in Munich is incredible, at least to my limited American viewpoint. The trip between our hotel on one end of the old city and the University of Munich on the other is about a 3 mile journey, or an hour’s walk. And while the walk would surely be very nice, I honestly do not want to wake up at 6 every morning just to make sure I make it to a 9 AM class every day. But by taking an underground train, then a tram (or streetcar, as some might call them), we can get to the university in about half an hour. And I do not have to pay hundreds of dollars and hopefully find somewhere to park at Soldier and Sailors.
To me, this is an amazing improvement in public infrastructure over what we have in Pittsburgh, or even in larger American cities. You’re telling me Munich has two separate varieties of train, plus streetcars, and buses? It’s glorious! But, the Germans I have met have complaints about their own public transport…
They say it’s too slow compared to Japanese trains, or that it’s not consistent enough with its time tables like in Italy, or that they’re less clean compared to stations they’ve seen in Singapore. None of these would have ever been my first thought. I barely noticed that the S4 train was 2 minutes late, because hey, at least it showed up! Can’t always say that about the PRT buses. And I saw maybe two cigarette butts, though I would be plenty comfortable with a five second rule.
This started to make me realize how little perspective we Americans have on what is possible with great investment into public transportation. Our infrastructure is so reliant on cars that we have forgotten what the alternatives could do to improve our cities. I went to Germany, saw what they had, and was blown away immediately. And yet, from their perspective there is still so much more to do, so many improvements to make. In retrospect, it makes American infrastructure feel backwards. Perhaps it really is.
Where, and why, are we so far behind? The engineering tact? Policy decisions, or public support and knowledge? Maybe all of the above. Whatever the case, it’s incredibly obvious to me that we have a long ways to go, and a lot of work should be done even to get us to the point where we can complain about our quality of public transport rather than complain about its nonexistence. Because right now, we largely don’t even know what we are missing out on.
Swanson School of Engineering 