It was just a random comment from a person I don’t know very well. He said, “I always feel so depressed when I come back to Boston from Washington, D.C.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about until recently when I came back to Boston from Washington D.C.

I was depressed.

I actually lived in Washington D.C. a long time ago. It was 99 degrees and humid from about May 1 to October 15. In such conditions I lose the will to live, so we had to move north. Now that global warming has made some Boston summers as hot as Washington’s if not as long, I was able to compare the cities in a way I couldn’t before.

My depression about Boston began when I decided to take public transportation from the airport to my home in downtown Boston. So I caught the Silver Line. The “bus rapid transit” was a bus and it wasn’t rapid. It was the noisiest mode of transportation I’d ever been on. It was so cramped that people rammed into one another, especially since the bus lurched and bumped over the roadways both above and below ground. It took more than an hour with a switch at South Station to reach my T stop. What a missed opportunity to extend a real line to the airport when we were building infrastructure in the Seaport District.

By cab my ride home would have taken about seven minutes door to door. But I was comparing the trip from the airport not to a cab ride, but to the Washington Metro I had taken from Reagan National Airport to Pennsylvania Avenue, a much longer distance than from Logan to my place. The Metro, which bounced around a little bit but was completely tolerable, took about 20 minutes from the airport to my station, which was about a five-minute walk to my hotel.

But it wasn’t only the transit. Washington, not Boston, should be called ‘America’s Walking City.’ You could walk everywhere from the Capitol to the museums to the White House and on to Georgetown. I didn’t ride the Metro much after my arrival because I wasn’t going far from Pennsylvania Avenue. But I could see by the map that I could have easily gotten by Metro from my home in D.C. to the place I had worked, had the Metro been finished when we lived there.

And the city was clean. Trash barrels were on every block, and they weren’t overflowing. The tree pits had been planted uniformly with the usual begonias and impatiens, but they were everywhere and in good shape. Apparently their installation and care was not up to the individual businesses or landlords, who in Boston would neglect them. If this is how the federal government does things, I couldn’t figure out what the Tea Baggers were complaining about.

There are, of course, tons of things to see in Washington. And they are all free. I’m not suggesting that Boston’s museums should be free—at least not all the time. But I could see why a family would go to Washington before they’d come to Boston. Both are expensive cities, but you can spend days in DC and spend little money for entertainment.

Spending money was something I did in Washington, and most of it went to restaurants. The restaurants were spectacular, and they were everywhere. I was reminded of the feeling we had when we moved back to Boston from Washington long ago. At that time there were few restaurants in Boston. Those that were here were more famous for their rude waitresses and their exclusionary policies (think Durgin Park and Locke-Ober) than their food. Boston restaurants are now considerably better than they were, but Washington’s offerings still felt more interesting, more lively and more varied.

So why do any of us live in Boston rather than Washington, D.C.? It’s still the weather—it’s usually cooler in the summer, and if you live here, you must like snow at least a little bit.  Washington had all the problems and none of the gratifications of winter. And then it’s our jobs. Then it’s our friends. And then it’s the access to the coast. New England’s ocean waters are brisk but swimmable. The water in the coastal regions near Washington is warm like bath water. It’s disgusting.

And it’s still the residential downtown-ness of Boston, where within a few minutes you can walk through your own neighborhood to another one and then on to another one. While Washington now has some residential buildings in its downtown, it’s still a hike from Capitol Hill to Georgetown.

So I’m still hoping for better transit, cleaner streets, and more attention to streets, sidewalks and plantings. But at least I can go outside in the summer.