[tptacek]

Utrecht is about as far from Amsterdam as Orland Park is from Chicago. Train connectivity between Orland and Chicago: also pretty frequent and reliable.

It's a little unfair to compare that particular run to the entire state of Michigan, which would be the 20th largest country in Europe if admitted to the EU, just behind Iceland and ahead of Hungary.

[maxerickson]

That's fair, I wasn't in NL long enough to really get a sense for distance. Took the train to Amsterdam once.

(we're both making some edits)

I think the higher density is part of why Europe seems to have more nice cities though. I actually kind of joked about that while I was there, that the publicly owned land in Michigan is roughly the size of the Netherlands (the national and state forests).

With high density, if you "need" cityscape you can just build a rail to where it makes sense to have the city.