Today I'm starting a new category of post on the blog - Travel Diaries. In this category, I'll be making some observations of how the transport systems work in different places I happen to be travelling to - the good, the bad, the interesting or the unusual. It'll probably usually be my usual essay-ish style of post, but since I'm trying to stick to a more regular posting schedule, sometimes I may just knock out some dot points.
I've recently started a semester of exchange studies in Amsterdam, which is a pretty great opportunity for a number of reasons - for one thing, I get to study some really interesting subjects that tie into the topic of this blog, like Transport Economics, Urban & Regional Economics, Economics of Climate Change, and so on. For another, Amsterdam (and the Netherlands more generally) has a reputation for having great public and active transport, and it'll be great to see that first hand.
There's always a danger that visiting a city as a tourist - for a short time, and with slightly unusual travel patterns - can kind of distort your perceptions of the city's transport network. For example when I went to Japan last, I never experienced any crowding in Tokyo's subway system - because I never really travelled during peak hours.
So it'll be good to experience Amsterdam as a resident, living here day-to-day for six months. But by the same token, a lot of the other places I'll be writing about I will have only visited for a short time as a tourist, so take things with a grain of salt. I generally won't do a ton of background research - it's just my observations as an outsider.
First cab off the rank is a city I visited on the way over here - Singapore. Stay tuned for that tomorrow.
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