re: #251 Walter L. Newton

Not only that, those European cities also have the readily accessible metro systems and bus systems… all three of those transportation models support each other.

If I lived in Paris, and wanted to see a musical… let’s say Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Starlight Express,” I could get on the Paris Metro, get off at Garde d’est, take the train to Bochum Germany (bet you never heard of the town) and then take bus to the Starlighthalle (a permanent theatre built for the show), see the show and be back in Paris sometime around 2:00am in the morning, under a 24 hour day trip.

But it’s those three services working in tandem that makes this possible. Here in the US, we are no where near that sort of infrastructure.

That’s right. Here, it is unusual to have a rail link between downtown and the airport. A few big cities have that, but most don’t.

Paris is a great example: we took the RER from CDG, made one transfer, and came out of the Metro a half block from the hotel. It doesn’t get much better than that.