I keep looking at these two maps of swapped rail networks, courtesy of the Twitter account cars.destroyed.our.cities, and shaking my head. One is the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, overlaid with the rail network of Germany's Duisburg and Essen:
And the other is Duisburg and Essen with the rail network of the Twin Cities:
The two are replicated at the same scale, which means the two German cities are just about as far apart as downtown Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
I don't know about you, but I've never heard of Duisburg and barely heard of Essen, but both are larger than either Minneapolis or Saint Paul, though not tremendously so. I think their metropolitan area size is pretty comparable, though more compact because it isn't as car-based. It's north of Dusseldorf and Cologne.
It's enlightening and maddening to see this contrast, and know that these German cities are considered to have second-rate transit at best.
2 comments:
A pretty revealing comparison.
Essen is known to all crossword solvers. I think it's an industrial center.
That's probably why Essen is familiar - and also because the word means "to eat."
I learned from reading the Wikipedia pages for both cities about their industrial histories (and roles in World War II...). But I didn't know any of that before now.
Like the U.S. Midwest, there are a lots of places around the world that people from other countries have never heard of unless you happened to visit or know someone from there. We all know about the biggest cities, or ones famous from history. But there can be pretty large or even very large cities that are completely unknown to most people in other parts of the globe. What a big world we live in!
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