I consider 'average travel speed' to be a critical metric by which to judge society.
There is an average travel speed for people, information, and goods.
The telegraph, telephone, and internet all revolutionised travel speed for information. Each one enabled far more than the one before it.
Average travel speeds for people haven't done so well - people in London 100 years ago travelled at an average of 12 mph, mostly on trains and cars. Today, travel in London still averages 12 mph. People still spend 1-2 hours most days travelling.
Planes with jet engines have a big boost to international travel speeds, but the fact they cannot be landed in your backyard means the average travel speed (including getting to and waiting at the airport) isn't great. And when they are expensive, they aren't used much, so don't impact the worldwide average much.
So: If you here on HN can think of a way to dramatically increase travel speed for people, goods, or information, I think you will become rich, famous, and very impactful.
I'm not sure there is much value in measuring this in simply spatial terms, like miles per hour. A mile of dense city covers a lot more "ground" than a mile of desert.
How about a measure which accounts for population or economic density, say "people per hour". Hard to make the units work though, as density is a "per square mile" type of quantity.
How about "number of people/businesses accessible within 1 hour" or 5 hours etc.
Number of people able to access necessary points of interest per hour per joule of energy used in that trip
A place where everybody can access all the things needed for life literally by walking out their front door is far superior to one where you have to step on a rocketship to go for groceries.
Also there has to be a point where you use so much space and energy for transportation that you will not be able to have any given unit of area support a lot of people.
If someone lives in a small village where everything is 5 minutes walk away, that person might still decide to work at the better paid job 30 mins drive away, or shop at the bigger shop in the next town over. And in his free time, he may choose to fly to a beach rather than spend his holiday in his garden or local park.
> Average travel speeds for people haven't done so well - people in London 100 years ago travelled at an average of 12 mph, mostly on trains and cars. Today, travel in London still averages 12 mph. People still spend 1-2 hours most days travelling.
Most people don't want to travel more than 30 minutes one-way on a day-to-day basis, and that has been true for most of history:
People used to walk 30 minutes to work, then perhaps cycle or take the train or tram, and post-WW2 drive for 30 minutes one-way. This increased the distance because which each new technology you could (theoretically) go faster, but the time stay the same (on average).
> So: If you here on HN can think of a way to dramatically increase travel speed for people, goods, or information, I think you will become rich, famous, and very impactful.
I think it's nearly trivial to have a system with much higher (2x? 3x?) traveling speeds: Rent a private jet. Doing this in a climate-friendly manner is merely (;)) an engineering challenge, cue synfuel. The real challenge is in scaling this up to the masses in a economical way.
The frustrating part is that air travel is obviously the best way to get people quickly from A to B. Humans have just the right size and weight. There's so much space available in the skies that congestion only is a problem at the nodes. Safety is great because everyone intuitively understands the risk. Speed is maximal and, most importantly, the amount of required infrastructure doesnt scale linearly with the number of connections. Yet, air travel is seen as obscene in modern society because it currently relies on fossile fuels. I fear it will never lose this stain.
What we're currently lacking is a strong movement to CO2 neutral, large airplanes. I believe if we'd focus on air travel the resulting solutions would be tremendously helpful to free other sectors from carbon emissions.
Jets need to be cheap and convenient enough that you decide to fly to another city to meet a friend for a coffee and fly back home. Sure, the flight might be only 30 mins, but the 'other stuff' makes it impractical.
That will never happen though. The aircraft world is ossified with regulations, and isn't the sort of industry a VC backed startup can swoop in and disrupt Uber style.
"I consider average travel speed to be a critical metric by which to judge society", is an interesting take on this.
I'm curious as to what aspects of a society it's measuring, what those metrics tell you about a society (e.g. it's values) and what sort of society you'd get by optimising for them or (just being contrary) trying to minimise them.
I mention this as the first thing that came to mind when I saw the title was the 15-minute city concept [1]:
"A 15-minute city is a residential urban concept in which most daily necessities can be accomplished by either walking or cycling from residents' homes."
"15-minute cities are built from a series of 5-minute neighborhoods, also known as complete communities or walkable neighborhoods".
"the 15-minute city concept as a way to ensure that urban residents can fulfill six essential functions within a 15-minute walk or bike from their dwellings: living, working, commerce, healthcare, education and entertainment."
I say this as someone who used to regularly commute over 1hour in each direction to work (London) and know of people who used to do closer to 2hours. This would have been massively sub-optimal (by a number of metrics) if I hadn't of spent a lot of evenings in london socialising, seeing gigs or doing courses/events etc.
So your work neighbourhood is walkable and your home/sleeping neighbourhood are walkable, it's just your commute that you don't perhaps walk (or cycle). Pre-WW2 / pre-car towns and villages outside of major metropolitan areas were reachable by train, but themselves pedestrian-based.
In practice there are various things that people tend to value about being able to live in less dense neighborhoods, so it's not surprising that they'd be willing to sacrifice travel time to achieve this.
Given that some people strongly prefer (or at least appear to strong prefer) aspects of those lower density residential areas, it seems as though faster travel enabling those people to live a life they enjoy has benefits to them, even if it doesn’t save them time as compared to living in a denser place they’d not like as much.
One data-heavy but useful addition to maps like these would be incorporation of time-of-day and day-of-week.
The distance you can travel on Monday morning at 9am differs greatly from the distance you can travel on Thursday at 3am, for example.
I've long thought it'd be useful to have that kind of information incorporated into gas station / charge station maps. IE: from a given position, how long will it take to travel to the nearest fillup station that will be open when I get there.
Can anyone explain it to me why this submission has been flagged? Yes, I saw it some weeks ago, but if that's the reason, it should be marked as dupe, not just flagged. It is a genuinely useful website and I don't see much criticism in the comment - apart from the fact that 20 minutes for interchange is too little. Nothing that deserves flagging though.
Good luck in Poland, where an hour delay for a train is not a surprise. I recently had one delayed for over 2.5h and had to get a hotel due to missed connection. No point even bothering asking them for a refund.
Of course, the problem in Poland is bad planning and lack of tracks. Europe on avarage has only got about half of the tracks we had before ww2, due to extensive damage. Still I can see things improving, slowly.
Idk, I've used to travel via train in southern Poland basically everyday for 2-3 years and delays longer than 10 mins I think I could count on the fingers of one hand
The 2.5h one was in Pomorze, but Im from the south too, I think you were lucky. Go on a random big station on infopasazer.intercity.pl and its likely youll see at least one 1h+ delay (granted its low traffic on sunday midday)
And memories. I miss the train from NY to Greenwich, CT. Or down to DC.
And Seattle to Portland, OR or to Vancouver, BC were both treats, too (with the exception of the slow Starlight northbound outta LA!). Treat trips with scenery and drinks!
Where I am now, it's an hour's drive to an Amtrak station and then several more to Chicago, the closest big city. Still pleasant, except for all the car.
Sadly, the fact that it assumes interchanges to be 20 minutes makes it, at least in some cases, far from reality.
At least for the local line of train I most often take (in France), the average time between trains is half an hour, but around 9AM, there is a gap of two hours (on work days) between two trains.
However, it's difficult in this form to choose a station: for big cities with many stations, you have to zoom in quite a lot to target one, but then with the zoomed view you can't see all the reachable stations...
Pretty cool, but damn is it slow. Takes about 25% of GPU and CPU here.
One could argue, it doesn't need to be faster, after all it is just an experiment. But I say, what if it were faster? Would we look at the same thing? Or rather, would he / she have added more features, maybe drawing on the map, planning trips or additional heat maps? Maybe some gamification? Oh the possibility!
But no, because its JS it's the end of the road.
We have to remind ourselves, that performance is the number one feature of Computing. If you sacrifice performance for easier development, you are working in the past.
> We have to remind ourselves, that performance is the number one feature of Computing
No. Utility and usability are the top features in computing. Performance is very important, but if you have the fastest website/app out there that doesn't do anything or it does it so bad nobody can use it, it's useless. As you can see, people can tolerate slower performance for utility and usability.
On a larger scale, performance dictates what you can have /at all/. If all we had was JS, we e.g. would not have machine learning, because that would be impractically slow and ultimately unviable.
It's not about the author, who did well with what was available. The point is that they deserved to build on better fundamentals than JS. We, as a collective, need to recognize and periodically remind ourselves of the burden we're inflicting ourselves and potential newcomers by considering JS good enough (including the billions that have been sunk in the attempt to make it acceptably performant for normal website needs). JS often gets praised for enabling quick development (quite wrongfully, being that mostly the merit of quick interface building granted by HTML and CSS) but rarely we stop and consider what we're giving up by limiting ourselves to such a crappy language and accompanying library stack.
Yes. There is a 2h15min high-speed train service between Paris and London via the channel tunnel (Eurostar), which is missing in the data. With connections, part of France is reachable from London, and vice versa. I guess the Deutsche Bahn data used to build this isochrone map is focused on continental Europe.
Graph theorists would call this a "critical bridge": if you remove this single Paris/London link, then a lot of indirect connections disappear without it. And the UK appears railway isolated from continental Europe, which it's not.
It is, but only from "Paris Nord", for which you have to zoom in and pick right next to "Paris Est". There are 4 or 5 train stations to pick from in Paris depending on your destination, and I'm guessing the added interchange time affects results (despite Paris Est and Paris Nord being basically 10 minutes walking distance for instance).
As a counter to this low-effort, flip comment, I semi-regularly take the Amtrak Capitol Corridor from San Jose to Sacramento. It is about 3 hours. It takes about 2 hours to drive with no traffic, but if you need to travel on a weekday during the morning or early evening, the train is much faster. And you can read/work/sleep/whatever.
I once took Amtrak from Portland to Seattle and it took me over an hour to make it across the Columbia River. Apparently it had something to do with a delay and freight trains having priority.
Even with bad traffic it takes longer for me to take the Metrolink to LA than if I drive. Up until recent gas price increases it was more expensive too. I haven't experienced rail service on the east coast, but at least in my experience on the west coast it is horribly broken. I say this as someone who believes in it and wants it to be successful. I have given it so many chances and it has failed me every time.
As someone from the east coast who's done both Seattle to Portland and Boston to New Haven, the difference is nuts. From what I understand, Amtrak owns the tracks on the NY-BOS stretch, but everywhere else has to yield to slow moving freight trains (we were stuck for 45 minutes). By comparison, the trip to New Haven was completely smooth sailing. The idea that passengers should yield to freight seems absolutely backwards to me.
There is an average travel speed for people, information, and goods.
The telegraph, telephone, and internet all revolutionised travel speed for information. Each one enabled far more than the one before it.
Average travel speeds for people haven't done so well - people in London 100 years ago travelled at an average of 12 mph, mostly on trains and cars. Today, travel in London still averages 12 mph. People still spend 1-2 hours most days travelling.
Planes with jet engines have a big boost to international travel speeds, but the fact they cannot be landed in your backyard means the average travel speed (including getting to and waiting at the airport) isn't great. And when they are expensive, they aren't used much, so don't impact the worldwide average much.
So: If you here on HN can think of a way to dramatically increase travel speed for people, goods, or information, I think you will become rich, famous, and very impactful.