Three Answers About Transit
Posted on 19 January 2026 by Jedidjah de Vries — 3 min
Favorite transit station
Los Angeles Union Station. It’s not my favorite because it’s a particularly good station. What I love about it is that in the middle of infamously car-centric L.A. there sits this (architecturally) beautiful building teeming with people using public transit to the fullest. It gives me hope. The fact that this station has persisted, and in recent decades even been expanded and revitalized, is an antidote to public transit fatalism. I think it’s a wonderful example that, if given the opportunity, people want to use, and like using, public transit. It’s a small vibrant foothold for a different future in the heart of car-dominated Los Angeles.
Transit system you would want to visit
I would love to visit and experience India’s rail system. It’s a system that I know relatively little about, especially compared to most European or even North American and other Asian systems. But I would love to learn more. I am fascinated by its sheer size, its rich history and present push for modernization, and just what an integral part of the broader fabric and workings of the country it is. It looks—at least from the outside—like an almost parallel rail culture to what we have in Europe. I think we rail nerds (especially the very online kind) sometimes get stuck in a little bit of a bubble, always referencing the same shiny new projects. I would love to go see, experience, and learn about something that is completely new to me.
And, if I was in India anyway, I would of course also want to visit Delhi’s metro because to have gone from nothing to what they have now in just two decades is impressive.
Would you consider yourself a public transit nerd, if so why?
I am 100% a public transit nerd. Public transit is about how we move around in space, how we access and use our cities, and ultimately about how we create community and live together. But all of that is built on the technical (aka nerd) minutia of alignments, routes, time tables, rolling stock, fare structures, station layout, intermodal options, headways, road design, and more. It’s that interaction, between the physical infrastructure and public policy on the one hand, and the human element on the other, that I really love about public transit. I studied public policy and I genuinely enjoy digging into reports, studies, and policy documents, analyzing qualitative and quantitative data, and bringing order to a mess of information so as to be able to explain it to others. Not everyone has to care about that nerd stuff, but what’s exciting about public transit is that everyone can appreciate the consequences of those details when it comes to their experience of using the transit system. And I mean that not just in the sense of making sure people can get from A to B as efficiently as possible. That’s just transit. The public part is where the magic happens. Because public transit doesn’t just allow us to move around, it allows us to move around together in our shared city.
I originally wrote these as part of a job application that I never heard back about. It felt like a waste to leave them sitting unread on my computer.