Trains, for me and so many others, invoke a deep and intangible romance. It is a romance of three parts.

The first is the romance of movement. A train implies a sense of direction, action, and purpose. There is something reassuring, core to the protagonist archetype, about being on track. We use the phrase to mean progress in life, as if each of us is meant to follow some invisible rail through the fog. The romance lies not just in motion, but in momentum. In narrative.

The second is the romance of thought. On a train, the mind is freed from duty. A car demands attention. A plane demands compliance — the cramped quarters and rigorous rules constrain the imagination along with the body. A train, however, simply offers a window and the time to look through it. It grants space for silence and everything that rushes to fill it. There is a particular quality of insight that visits you when the scenery is moving, and you are not.

The third is the romance of connection. Trains connect places, which connect people - seat to seat, gaze to gaze. Strangers face one another in seats arranged so unlike those on an airplane or a bus. Accidental physical contact, while avoided, is inevitable as the ebb and flow of bodies swirls like water around rocks. The small collisions of existence remind you that you’re not alone in it.

You couldn’t design a better four-dimensional stage for emotion. Which is, I suspect, why trains are such fertile ground for and within cinema. They are dense with narrative fuel: direction, intimacy, self-reflection. Try conjuring that same energy in an airport terminal, or an Uber. You can’t. The emotional temperature is so much lower there.

But a train. A train has a pulse. A train grows with a city, and a city… grows with a train.

Places that pulse with story — as so many grand cities tend to do — are shaped by infrastructure that invites story in. Cities with public trains feel alive because their architecture makes emotions easier to access. A city’s public transit is its circulatory system. Trains carry more than passengers. They carry plot.

Enter the foil: Columbus, Ohio.

I won’t be unkind to Columbus. I can’t be. I live here, and enjoy it. But if New York is a romantic city, Columbus is a platonic one. A city shaped by spreadsheets rather than stories.

Columbus is designed for function. The traffic mostly behaves. There is coffee worth drinking and there are restaurants worth visiting. It is livable in the most literal sense — you can live here. As so many do.

But what you gain in ease, you trade in texture. Columbus is not a city that moves you. It does not rise.

That may be the most telling thing of all. In a larger city, you live life in multiple dimensions. You descend into the earth to catch a train. You ascend glass towers to work or sleep. Your body moves vertically as often as horizontally, and the emotional landscape mirrors that elevation. You fall in love on stairwells. You argue on fire escapes. You have breakthroughs and breakups and breakdowns across a three dimensional physical landscape.

This is not a matter of aesthetics, or even culture. And to be certain, it is not a judgement. But — I am making a statement about how space is used. Architecture with emotion creates the character that makes our cities great. In cities with trains, the infrastructure demands interaction. It pushes people together physically and, in doing so, creates the possibility of intimacy, conflict, friction, and growth. In Columbus and cities like it, the dominant experience is distance. Drive-throughs. Parking lots. Office parks. Suburban loops. One person per vehicle, per errand, per day.

The modern city, in summation, is flat, both metaphorically and topographically. It sprawls. You move sideways — from lot to lot, driveway to driveway. You do not descend into it. You do not climb. You glide across its surface.

Fairly or not, Columbus is the foil to my observation about the emotional architecture of large cities. I’m not talking about decoration, but depth. A space that invites emotion simply by making room for it. A deep city makes you feel by giving you vantage points, thresholds, and collisions. A big city offers smooth edges and wide roads. Everything is accessible. Nothing is urgent.

This essay isn’t really about Columbus, and it isn’t really about New York. It’s about how we build, how we value space, and what we think people are supposed to do inside of it. A city like New York is romantic because it encourages feeling. A city like Columbus is platonic because it avoids it.

I believe this can change, naturally over time, or intentionally with effort. What would it look like to design a city that evokes thought, movement, and connection? What would it look like to plan neighborhoods like movie sets, seeking cinematic vantage points and unexpected encounters? In other words, what if a city made room for revelation, not just routine?

These are the questions I keep turning over in my head, especially as I’m walking down another long sidewalk past another new-build condo. Especially when I’m driving alone to meet someone who lives on the opposite side of a city built for cars, not people. Especially when I imagine what it might feel like to ride a train across Columbus — and the people I might meet while doing so.

Columbus is place you can live in, comfortably and quietly. It is a city that won’t hurt you. But also, maybe, won’t move you.