If you can urgently discuss population pressures and the wastefulness of low-density sprawl while riding through the moonscaped great basin of Utah and the primitive canyons of Colorado, you must really mean it.
Such was the scenic dialogue aboard the eastbound California Zephyr train that arrived last night in Denver. The seventeenth annual Congress for the New Urbanism will convene here today, but about a dozen affiliated architects, planners and developers from California decided to jump-start the conference with a two-day “salon-in-motion.” It kicked off Monday morning with a departure from the San Francisco bay area, where I smuggled myself aboard their two chartered railcars, a vintage stainless steel dome-top lounge and a matching sleeper. They were pulled behind the regular Amtrak Superliners at a cost (to the private charter operator) of $3.70 per mile.
The conversation, like the topography, was wide-ranging and occasionally grandiose. Despite the retro conveyance, the men (they were all men, except for one wife, a graphic designer) focused their energies on the current economic upheaval, new environmental goals, and what kind of future these factors—and they themselves—might conspire to create.
