Thanks all for reading and commenting on our non-motorized honeymoon travel series (see parts 1, 2, 3 and 4). Below is a table Susan put together to briefly summarize some of our observations on the cities we visited.

For those of you who want some more U.S. transit-oriented travel stories, check out Twin City Sidewalks' visits to Chicago and Washington, Babylon, L.I., Savannah, Ga. and Durham, N.C., and also visit Dave KCMO, who liveblogged his 8,789 miles on Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada.

Susan Donovan boarding Metro-North Train No. 737 on July 11, beginning an 8,000-mile rail journey at Grand Central Terminal.

I always find it a little amazing that a handful of times a day, one can descend into Penn Station -- the place where you go to catch the 6:13 to Babylon or the 7:37 to Upper Montclair -- and from the same platforms catch a train with beds and a dining car that will take you to Chicago, or Miami or Atlanta. In this case, we forsook that little pleasure for the much greater pleasure of departing for a transcontinental honeymoon from the grandeur of Grand Central Terminal, where we ran into a friend getting his shoes shined who took our picture and good-naturedly warned us about what married life was like.

After the departure, we transferred at Croton-Harmon to the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago. This is a train that ought to be used more for business travel than it is. If you can afford to leave New York in the late afternoon, this train gets you into Chicago at a quarter to 10, refreshed, well fed and relaxed, in time for your morning meeting or power lunch. Yes, I suppose it needs a better on-time rating to be used more by business travelers, but it is not uncommon for planes to run late as well. Our train arrived at 10:28, 43 minutes late.

The train's name, evocative of the Lake Erie coastline, is a bit of a misnomer. You travel along the lake at night, so you never really see it (at least I never have and I've taken this train quite a few times to Cleveland). But can see something with majestic views that more than makes up for it. The wide and mighty Hudson, which the train hugs all the way to Albany.

View of ship traffic on the Hudson River from the Lake Shore Limited.

After spending time in Chicago we caught the Empire Builder for a three-day, two-night trip to Seattle. Pulling through Chicagoland's suburbs, I noticed a number of shipping warehouses with spur tracks going into them that were buried and weedy, while trucks in large parking lots had taken over rail-marshalling yards. The freight railroads stock was on the rise for years before Warren Buffet started buying (look up BNI, UNP, CSX or NSC for some examples), and these warehouses indicate that they have plenty of room for continued growth if shippers continue to switch to fuel efficient freight rail. An hour and a half later, we were in Milwaukee, which seemed like a city we would have liked:

Milwaukee waterfront as seen from the Empire Builder.

After Milwaukee we rumbled into Minnesota, stopping at St. Paul and passing the Mississippi what seemed like four or five times. Then it was a long night and day roll through the northern prairie and big sky country of Montana before we got to the Rockies. To answer Ianqui's question from the other day, yes, the trains generally seemed filled to capacity, although people would get on and off at intermediate stops to create an ever-changing dynamic. The Empire Builder was the most crowded, and it would have been impossible to book this one but we lucked out because someone cancelled. Here's the scene at Whitefish, Mont., where we stopped at 10 p.m.

The Empire Builder stops in Whitefish, Mont.

The Empire Builder came to its final stop, Seattle, at 9:42 a.m., 43 minutes ahead of schedule. After our visit there we boarded the Pacific Northwest's version of Acela: the Cascades. It's a sleekly designed train imported from Europe that makes medium-distance runs between Vancouver, B.C., and southern Oregon. This is a train that is trying as much as possible to be an airplane. They have television screens that show your relative position over the land you're traveling, which they sometimes show on a flight, and a looooong safety video that goes into way too much detail for a train. By the end of it, you're waiting for them to say: In the event of a water landing, your seat cushion may be used as a flotation device. But the food car has a counter where you can sit and a hip and modern ambiance.

Amtrak's Cascades arrives in Portland.

After the Cascades took us to Portland, we switched to the West Coast's long-distance train, the Coast Starlight, for two runs: An overnight trip to Oakland, and what was to have been a daytime trip from San Jose to Los Angeles. This train had the worst on-time performance of our trip, but it had the coolest lounge. Actually, it is called the Parlor Car, to distinguish it from the lounge car next door. With wood and glass paneling and plush swivel seats and benches, this lives up to its old-timey sounding name. The parlor car is where we had our second wine-and-cheese tasting. (The first had been on the Empire Builder.) Downstairs, there was even an unused movie theater. Here's a photo of the Coast Starlight rounding a sharp bend as we approached the Bay Area.

The Coast Starlight rounds a bend in northern California.

We pulled into Oakland four hours late and hopped the BART at Lake Merrit to San Francisco. After our time there, rather than go back on the BART again, we we rode the MUNI light rail (it was packed with baseball fans hoping to see Barry Bonds hit his 755th home run) to CalTrain for a ride south along the San Francisco peninsula to San Jose. CalTrain is a double-decker commuter train that has an incomparable feature that encourages intermodal, non-oil-guzzling transportation: The bike car. The bottom level has a large open space where you bring your bike in and tie it to racks on the wall. You sit upstairs. I'll write it again because it is such a pleasure to type: bike car. Only in California.

At San Jose, we caught the second of the two Coast Starlights, and it was running even later. The morning we were to head to Los Angeles, a woman from Amtrak called to say that our train was running 12 hours late. It had gotten stuck behind a freight train in the Cascades mountains and that train had broken down. As she no doubt prepared for me to fly into an apoplectic rage, I just said, "Great! Give us a sleeper!" Actually, we had already been in touch with Julie, Amtrak's ever-chipper automated agent, who told us about the lateness. (When traveling on Amtrak, you have to maintain constant contact with Julie, who always has up-to-date information and has the potential to reduce your wait time dramatically.) I was actually excited because the lateness gave us 12 more hours in San Francisco, time to sleep in, and saved us money because we were able to cancel a hotel room.

A little while after arriving in L.A. we departed on the Sunset Limited (the train that Pete Sessions tried to eliminate while we were on it), for the longest train of our trip -- a 48-hour ride to New Orleans. We took a lot of photographs on that train because there were plenty of sights that illustrate humanity's impact on the environment.

Automobile junkyard outside Los Angeles as seen from the Sunset Limited.

A desert wind farm. It would take a lot of wind farms to replace the oil we import.

Newly minted desert sprawl. It sells better if you have a giant red balloon to attract attention.

If you don't have a giant red balloon, multicolored flags work well too.

Nature strikes back: A flooded automobile junkyard in east Texas.

Texas is so huge it took us 24 hours to cross it. Vast portions of the east side of the state were flooded when we passed, but thankfully this didn't stop the train. We went through Houston and on to New Orleans. People along this route seemed especially friendly. I can't shake the image of a whole crew of workers in some kind of big open warehouse stopping what they were doing and waving at the train. We pulled into New Orleans six hours late, but we didn't care much because we were just excited to be there. After our time in the Big Easy, we rode our last train home: The Crescent. You see a lot of kudzu on that route.

Kudzu vines, as seen from the Crescent.

In Washington, the Crescent picks up an electric engine for the relatively speedy home stretch along the Northeast Corridor.

In Washington, an electric locomotive prepares to pull the Crescent to New York.

As we neared home, we passed into the old Northeast. The densely built-up cities in this part of the country are obsolete -- relics of a past and much different economy that didn't allow people to have the amount of private space and separation that people demand today. Future growth will happen in low-density communities, especially in the sunbelt. At least, that is the message or implication of a long line of pundits. Joel Garreau. Joel Kotkin. David Brooks. Robert Bruegmann.

But if those guys are correct, why the evident difficulty selling those subdivisions we saw? And why are skyscrapers rising in downtown Philadelphia?

Skyscrapers under construction in downtown Philadelphia, as seen from Amtrak's Crescent.

The series will wrap-up tomorrow with a handy summary in chart form.

San Francisco

Fully restored streetcars, cable cars, buses with and without pantographs, submerged and at-grade light rail, a regional subway and two commuter rail lines all make for a dizzying array of often very scenic public transportation. (Although, with a $5 fare, the cable cars seem more like a tourist draw and less like a form of public transit.) But even in a city that like New York derives much of its appeal from having a walkable, pre-automobile environment, we read about how pro-traffic forces are trying to reshape the city to accommodate more cars. There's apparently a big vote coming up in November on whether to continue transit-first policies or build a lot of parking garages (which would seem to counteract the $159 million San Francisco just won for congestion pricing).

Los Angeles

Making fun of Los Angeles car dependency was already a cliche decades ago. We didn't want to fall into that trap. We arrived in L.A. with open minds, hoping that it just might pleasantly surprise us. It did and it didn't.

L.A.'s Amtrak station is spectacular, way better than ours (not that that says anything). High ceilings, wide corridors and open concourses with a warm, inviting feeling and soft armchairs for waiting. (Wikipedia's photo does it justice.) It was also busier than we expected, serving morning commuters when we arrived but still busy in the afternoon. It's Amtrak's fifth busiest station (scroll).

Then we exited the station and found ourselves feeling like second class citizens walking with our luggage along wide, busy boulevards and buildings that were distant from one another. Pedestrians are actually forbidden from crossing the street right in front of the station, so we had to take some kind of circuitous route to get back to the station, crossing extra streets unnecessarily. Because of a little bit of a snafu that I'll describe tomorrow, we spent less time in L.A. than we had planned: just five hours. We spent most of it struggling with a crossword puzzle outside a Starbucks three blocks from Union Station.

New Orleans

New Orleans is recovering from Katrina. We stayed across the street from a monument to General Robert E. Lee in the Central Business District, three blocks from Amtrak. This area, like the French Quarter, was never flooded and the Quarter was bustling as always on the weekend we were there. Most of the many cyclists we saw in New Orleans were riding one-speed coaster bikes, which is a trend we didn't see anywhere else. There was also a fair proportion of trikes used to haul stuff. But the transportation highlight was definitely the streetcars, which have friendly drivers, friendly fellow passengers, and tall, wide windows that allow you to see the great panorama before you. Their grassy right-of-way does its little part at reducing the portion of our country paved with the impervious surfaces like asphalt, which are so harmful to drinking water supplies. The oldest and longest streetcar line in NOLA, along St. Charles Avenue, is now running as a short downtown shuttle until the rest of the line can be put back into service. Because I love them so much: two more photos of New Orleans streetcars below the jump.

A grassy median forms the bed of the New Orleans streetcars' right-of-way in some places.

Canal Street streetcar, at the intersection where Carondelet becomes Bourbon.

In between all that fun Amtrak travel I described yesterday, my wife Susan and I stopped on our honeymoon at six great cities with an eye toward observing their built environments and transportation systems (but mostly just being plain old tourists). Below are photos and brief observations from the first three, in the order we visited.

Chicago 

The railroading capital of the United States is a great, great town, loved by New Yorkers for generations. We love it too, right?

Chicago had a lakefront exhibit of great big globes encouraging people to adopt environmentally friendly but inoffensive habits, like setting one's washing machine to cold or switching to compact florescent light bulbs. But next to the exhibit, when we tried to hail a pedicab to take us downtown, we were told that pedicabs are not allowed in the Loop. Ouch. Our recently imposed pedicab restrictions were bad enough, but this takes it to a whole new level. On the plus side, Chicago has the coolest-sounding train-related terminology that we found: the Metra Electric District.

Seattle

We had hoped not to get into a single automobile on the whole trip, but in Seattle (and only in Seattle), that broke down, mostly because we had a friend in town who owned a car and was putting us up at his place. This city has what seems like hundreds of bus routes, but the one we needed never came, even though two drivers on other routes and other passengers all swore it was running on the Sunday we arrived. After we got off the train we waited and waited for our bus. Then we took a different bus to a more central stop to try our luck there. Then our friend Matt offered to pick us up from the bus stop. We accepted because he said he completely understood our motivating principle, but was downtown anyway and would be burning the same amount of gasoline either way. He drove us again a few more times, including to Lake Union go kayaking, which was worth it.

However we still wanted to explore Seattle on foot, so we walked through downtown, adjacent Belltown, where new condos are going up like mad, and residential Queen Anne Hill. Somewhere in there we noticed the signs all around Seattle encouraging people to ride transit. They have sayings like "Take the monorail, Abigail," and "Take the bus and relax, Max." Slogans aside, Seattle already had what Ted Kheel knows is a better incentive. At least downtown, its buses are free.

Portland

Like Seattle's downtown buses, Portland's downtown light rail does not charge a fare. Our hotel was in the free zone, and we felt a little guilty riding so much for free, so we vowed to spend our extra money in various Portland businesses, like the worker-owned bicycle cooperative where we rented bikes. The bikes were great, as they allowed us to really see the city and its nearby bike trails up close and personal. As I stood watching cyclists pass by on a fully-separated bike lane next to a light rail line and a aerial tram depot, I realized why it is said that Portland has the most diverse multimodal transportation network in the country for a city its size. One of those modes is the automobile, which in places is catered to as much as any suburb. On the way to the rail, we'd pass curb cuts used by cars and SUVs in the drive-thru restaurant and drive-thru Starbucks across from our hotel, engines idling as their occupants awaited their morning venti mocha frap. Portland leads the nation in many ways, but hey, it's not perfect.

And even in Portland, we learned, bike and transit networks are under attack. This newspaper article described the efforts of one Craig Flynn, a local activist and one-time city council candidate who "thinks city transportation funds should go toward relieving congestion on freeways and other main roads, specifically adding lanes or building new freeways." He told the paper: "I feel like honking my horn going over a speed bump to irritate the people who want them there."

In tomorrow's installment, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans.

My wife and I were married last month in Brooklyn. For our honeymoon, we wanted to see as many great American cities as we could. In 19 days of travel, we visited Chicago, Seattle, Portland (Ore.), San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans (and also stopped briefly in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia).

How could two people as obsessed as we are with minimizing our transportation carbon footprints possibly justify taking so many flights for leisure travel? We didn't take any flights. We also didn't rent any cars or even set foot in a single taxi. We learned that thanks to the magic of transit-oriented hotel development (often inadvertent), it is entirely possible to travel this great country from sea to shining sea without any of those carbon-belching modes of travel -- and still have a fantastic time.

Our intercity travel consisted of 33 miles on Metro-North (because we couldn't allow ourselves to depart for such a historic trip from Penn Station), 48 miles on CalTrain, and 7,840 miles on our underfunded national railroad, Amtrak. To travel about in town, we rented bikes in Portland but mostly used an amazing variety of light rail, bus and subway transportation, including trips on Chicago's El, Portland's TriMet light rail, San Francisco's Muni and BART and New Orleans' streetcars. All of which worked perfectly well for our purposes.

Despite the large number of transit providers, it was Amtrak that did the heavy lifting and made our vacation possible. Amtrak employees are painfully aware of the railroad's reputation as habitually late. They desperately wanted to provide an on-time, high quality service, but were demoralized when the trains ran late and frustrated because it was almost always for reasons beyond their control.

We took six Amtrak trains more or less through the entire length of their routes: The Lake Shore Limited, the Empire Builder, the Cascades, the Coast Starlight, the Sunset Limited and the Crescent. All of these trains left their departure stations on time to the minute. It wasn't until we got moving that delays occured, and these were caused by chronic underinvestment in rail infrastructure that has left many lines with just a single track. The lines are owned by freight railroads, which Amtrak pays for the rights use. The freight railroads are in increasingly intense competition with one another for customers, and have a habit of having passenger trains wait at a siding while freight trains roll through. Despite this, the Empire Builder managed to travel 2,206 miles from Chicago to Seattle and still arrive 38 minutes ahead of schedule. If our national government invested in rail improvements just a fraction of the billions of dollars it spends annually on highway maintenance and widening, Amtrak would run on time and more people would ride it.

As gasoline prices have gone up and congestion at airports has increased, Amtrak has had record ridership for multiple years in a row, despite being starved by the Bush administration, which wanted to disband the railroad, and the Republican-led Congress. Many threats remain. On the day we rode rode the Sunset Limited across Texas, a Republican congressman from Texas introduced legislation that would have eliminated the Sunset Limited. (It was defeated with the help of our region's congressional delegation by a vote of 299-130.)

But the trains are still running and we had the time of our lives on this trip. Even if its running late, and even if they've replaced the chefs in the dining car with microwave ovens, there remains something inherently enjoyable and relaxing about riding on a train across vast distances. You have time to yourself to sit and watch the world roll by, completely stress free, and sleeping in a real honest-to-God bed while rolling along through the undulating darkness is just incomparable to anything else experienced in travel. Now with the addition of laptop computers, you can watch a DVD or play tetris to pass the time, but I prefer to leave the screen off and look out the window.

This is the first part of a five-part series on our travels to run this week. Parts two and three will focus on the cities we visited, with brief updates on their struggles for livable streets. Part four will describe in greater detail the trains we rode and the sights we saw. Part five will compare the cities to one another in terms of livable streets, pedestrian-friendly development and intermodal transportation.

The great American poet Robert Hunter has written that he and the other members of the Grateful Dead had the greatest time of their lives aboard a train across Canada that carried themselves, Janice Joplin, The Band and many other musicians. That's high praise from people who spent their lives rocking out. The trip inspired Hunter to write some lines that became the motto for our honeymoon:

No big hurry
What do you say
Might as well travel
The elegant way

UPDATE: Here are the other entries in this series:

• Part 2: Chicago, Seattle, Portland
• Part 3: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans
• Part 4: The Trains
• Part 5: Wrap-Up

San Francisco

Like Clarence Eckerson, I recently returned from a visit to San Francisco. I left with a feeling that San Francisco has the best urban surface transportation in the country: emissions-free buses drawing power from overhead wires, regular buses, cable cars moving up and down steep hills, many cyclists despite those hills, partially buried lightrail and a regional subway. But the most heartwarming thing to see was the streetcars. What a joyous and democratic mode of transportation, the streetcar.

Sure, we have light rail over in Jersey City, and it's great to have that. But there is nothing like an honest-to-God fully functioning streetcar system like the one San Franciscans have managed to preserve restored on Market Street and the Embarcadero (the F Line). Think they're just for tourists? Maybe the cable cars, but the streetcars I saw were standing-room-only, with a mix of visitors and natives. There are probably other models visible in museums, but these old cars and the ones New Orleans still only partially restored after Hurricane Katrina are the last in the country still doing the heavy lifting. At least for now.

Now that the corpse of the ill-fated attempt to bring streetcars to Red Hook (pictured above) is cold, we can begin to think about the new efforts to bring streetcars back to Brooklyn. 'Frisco proves that it is possible.

(Top two photos by Futurebird.)