Here is another one where I actually ride a train!
So, important news about this thread: in two weeks, I will be back in the United States. Actually, less than two weeks! There is some trepidation about that, of course, travelling is always stressful.
So this might be the last video where I ride a train here.
This trip was one of my favorite trips I've taken here, even though it was just a day trip.
I traveled by bus to Cartago, and then by another bus to the mountain town of Tierra Blanca. One of the intriguing things about this is that this town is about 12 miles from the center of San Jose, and 4 miles from the Cartago train station. So imagine driving 12 miles from the center of Washington, DC, and being surrounded by onion farms! Although the terrain here is quite different: the bus from the middle of Cartago to Tierra Blanca, goes from about 1500 to 2100 meters, or about 2000 feet of elevation gain.
Anyway, so here is the one, single, big, important takeaway from this, that is really important to how we think about transit.
In the United States, one of the definitions of "rural" is that people don't live in communities. There are exceptions to this, but in general, "rural" is equated by living alone, without direct, regular contact with neighbors, and that interaction with a community has to be done by private vehicle. And that is taken for granted in the US, but here (and in a lot of places), rural living means living in communities...just smaller communities. So this video shows a town of a few thousand people, with a small central square where locals do their shopping and talk and meet, surrounded by fields---but it also has bus service every 15 minutes, and people can reach a major city where they can ride a train to the capital.
One of the great things about trips like this is it allows me to see what communities look like in different places, and that a lot of the denotation that we use for types of communities isn't true in different places.