I dunno. On first glance, for a "21st-Century" textbook, this seems to place a high emphasis on classical music theory, and moves very highly influential modern styles to the back burner -- notably jazz. And there is essentially no discussion of music theory in other cultures (middle eastern, african, east asian, indian), nor current analysis of pop and rock music.
I have a BA in Music Theory, I think maybe you should consider again. First off, Jazz relies on the same fundamentals and extends them, everything from Classical music is somewhat relevant in Jazz. So if it's only Jazz theory exclusive to classical, it'd be an advanced book indeed.
Second, it literally has a chapter on Popular Music and another on Jazz Theory, and "Classical" is not found in its chapter titles. So I don't think your critique is accurate.
Third, history and time matter. "Theory" came first in "classical" contexts, with codified rules pre-dating even Bach. Jazz was a much later invention that built upon these and other traditions. Both of the Jazz theory books I used in my BA in Music Theoryhad many elementary topics already covered in Classical contexts.
Yes, I think people have this fantasy that Jazz has anything new to offer in terms of music theory. That's false, everything used in Jazz was already part of the practice of classical music sometimes centuries ago. For example, improvisation was common in Mozart time and extended chords were common already in the 19th century. The only difference may be the terminology used in Jazz circles, but this is something that can be learned later if you want to specialize in that style.
I know a lot of people with music degrees. This is a widely acknowledged problem. It doesn't have a simple answer, especially as academic music programs are shrinking. You can't teach everything except at a survey level. You have to find faculty who can teach new topics at a college level. And students who are prepared to dive in. Music students tend to already be damn good musicians by the time they start college.
If programming is an analogy, it's said that once you've learned your first language, you can learn any other language in a jiffy. Also, a lot of higher level learning is "learning how to learn." Maybe it's better to have a standardized "first language" that students can learn in depth, and then let them move into other areas at their own discretion.
I don't have a college degree, but for me, classical music lessons were a great preparation for learning jazz, and I've picked up pop, rock, and folk music on my own. In fact, on the instrument that I play, the double bass, gaining proficiency and experience in jazz without that background is a brutal learning curve.
This is really 12 tet music theory. A very complete and great resource from the looks of it IMO.
I love Balinese gamelan and also the Bohlen–Pierce scale. It is not tractable to to cover non-12 tet. Each of just those subjects could cover the length of the whole resource.
The pop music part is like complaining the computer science class doesn't go over react. This is all what pop music is based on.
Anecdotally, I know a few people who spent decades working on and/or teaching middle eastern music in conservatories abroad, and they struggle greatly to find music departments in the US who will hire them. A problem I've seen firsthand is that there are a lot of senior professors who teach it hand wavy versions of it filtered through whatever books Euro orientalists wrote mid century and are threatened at the prospect of someone coming in there who has studied and practiced it for years in places where it's more of a living art form cutting into their position of expertise.
Where this ties in to your point is that part of the reason they really don't want experts is that they rarely have someone whose job it is to teach middle eastern music. They might have a guitar teacher with some experience with oud, a flute teacher who can passably play ney (usually with awful intonation), etc. For most schools, these other types of music are "add-ons" that they have their existing faculty teach.
There is a big problem in music of tradition being elevated too much. If it wasn't used 300 years ago, or is changed in anyway it must be bad. (except the brass is allowed to add valves even though those are modern)
> And there is essentially no discussion of music theory in other cultures (middle eastern, african, east asian, indian)...
To me, that above ^ looks like the biggest gap.
To be fair, the book doesn't claim to demonstrate theory of the "world music" (sic, a phrase as bad as it sounds).
My (brief and shallow) understanding is that most scholars of music in the western world just do not have enough knowledge to talk intelligently about non-western genres. Exceptions exist, of course, but they are quite rare.
[Other reason is that there is a lot of gate-keeping. I've seen that in Hindustani/Carnatic classical studies, FWIW, which is one my areas of interest]
I don't understand why this standard is always applied to westerners. When we go to other countries, are they explaining all the fundamentals of western music in addition to the theories of their own? "Yeah our students in Boston don't know anything about Carnatic rhythm, but over in Bengal they all learn counterpoint and fugue before they learn the traditional ornaments"
I suspect given western dominance in economics others have exposure to western music traditions. I wouldn't expect exposure to traditions other than their own and western.
Indeed, the musical traditions of western Europe and Africa, forged together in the Americas, dominate world culture. Turn on the radio anywhere in the world and you will hear the influences of jazz, rock, funk, samba, hip-hop, etc.
Analyzing jazz voice leading would be extremely difficult without understanding the basic rules of harmonic analysis from the common practice period it evolved from and built on.
It sounds like what you're looking for is closer to a general survey of music traditions for listeners.
Jumping straight to jazz theory would be like skipping all chemistry prerequisites to get to Organic Chemistry first because it's more relevant for modern biochem/human medical treatments than stuff like molarity or stoicheometry.
I was trained to type two spaces after a period: it's in my muscle memory. This website treats it as a mistake. No typing teacher would downgrade for that. It's awful.
It's true that the space between sentences should be larger than the space between words, as it is in properly typeset text, though not twice as large. Using two spaces is a way to approximate that when you only have monospaced fonts. It's no longer encouraged in electronic text when using proportional fonts because the rendering software _should_ adjust the spacing itself.
It "should" adjust, but in practice most software do not render spaces after periods properly. There is no in band signal to distinguish periods for sentence ends vs e.g. Mr. Thus there is a clear argument for double spacing in all contexts
Buddy, there are rules and there are recommendations. The fact that it was common practice to use two spaces after a period up until the early 2000s in many situations shows that it is not in fact a rule, which is linguistic (as in the capitalization rules for proper nouns), but a recommendation, which is stylistic.
Stylistic recommendations can also be taken as rules, but in limited situations, such as a place of work saying we follow these guidelines (a manual of recommendations), which then become rules for that workplace.
Finally this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing shows that their complaint has some merit, because the spacing used are not rules of the language, but conventions or recommendations imposed to improve the production of text based on the requirements and limitations of a particular technology.
on edit: probably shouldn't describe capitalization as being a linguistic rule, as it is an orthographic rule...heat of the moment, sorry. One might argue that the same applies to spacing, but I suppose that capitalization in orthography has been established for so long, and in so many different systems that it can be claimed a rule whereas spacing is still just a recommendation.
It was on typewriters because the fonts were monospace so the period would have some extra space to its left, the double space after it made it easier to see at a glance where a new sentence occurs.
I know Racket was reworked to build upon Chez Scheme several years ago. If the HN migration to CL was due to performance reasons, I wonder if sticking it out and waiting for the Chez version of Racket would have paid off.
I’m curious: was Arc running Racket BC or CS? I understand it got a big performance boost after switching to Chez Scheme.
dang: It was running BC. I had high hopes for switching to CS because I'd heard the same thing you had, but when I tried it, HN slowed to a crawl. This stuff is so unpredictable.
I can't remember the details, but I recall that Arc was pinned to an older version of Racket and didn't benefit from improvements to BC and then later to CS.
But ... be aware that the Arc interpreter is much more dynamic than Racket, so in general normal Racket programs are more efficient than Arc programs.
I need a UI which runs well on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, without having to build three different ones. Swing is still easily the best, most consistent, and most native-feeling cross-platform environment. It's much better than QT and GTK in most respects. And Java also runs elegantly on a little platform you may know as Android. I have high hopes for go and rust. But until they have mature UIs, they're out (for me).
C and C++ are dangerous languages filled with security failings and footguns, and no modern app should be written in them.
It's been my experience that well-written low-level Java code runs at about 75% the speed of good C code. (Of course lazy coders write in cushy Java which is much slower). When written efficiently, Java's biggest slowdown lies in array access (C and C++ array access is fast because it is very, very unsafe). But Java makes up for this in having a GC which will coalesce related objects into the same page and so take advantage of cache coherency effects in ways malloc and free cannot possibly do. I have some allocation-heavy algorithms in Java which are, as a result, significantly faster than well-written equivalents in C.
In heavily performance-engineered code having a GC coalesce memory is a pessimization in all cases.
I've done a lot of performance engineering in both C++ and Java. Every optimization available in Java also exists in C++ but the reverse is not true, which is why C++ is always faster. Every example I have ever seen of Java being faster than C++ was just poorly optimized code. The heuristic I use is that heavily optimized C++ is about twice as fast as heavily optimized Java at the limit. And this requires some non-idiomatic and ugly Java that isn't nice to maintain.
This doesn't necessarily make Java the wrong choice though. Few organizations prioritize absolute performance above all other things. There are practical tradeoffs.
What type and size of applications have you worked on?
@pron, who works on the JVM and is a C++ expert, has been writing a lot recently about low level languages becoming increasingly impossible to optimize with more LOC and more people working on it (dozens, or even hundreds of developers).
The idea being be a language with an aggressive JIT, moving garbage collector, and bump allocation is going to allocate/deallocte faster than malloc, and get the most important average optimizations at all times, where as the equivalent low level app will struggle to get the ideal allocation pattern the more people that work on it, or be forced to use slow dynamic dispatch. He wouldn't describe a GC as pessimistic, he'd say it's literally faster, and that's why he (a C++ programmer) works on it. The JVM was built by people saying "we are doing a handful of the same things in C++ all the time."
There are specific cases where it's good to have low level control, but they aren't everywhere.
I work on analytical data engines. Lots of spatial and graph-like joins on PB-to-EB scale data models often concurrent with extremely high rates of real-time ingest into the same data model. I’ve also done a lot of work in HPC and more conventional databases at smaller scales. Typical code base is in the range of 100k-1M LoC in C++. Java has more LoC equivalent but it isn’t used much for these applications anymore because it scales significantly worse as systems and hardware become larger.
Almost all optimization is architectural in nature. Properly performance-engineered code allocates no memory after bootstrap. There is no possible way even in theory for a GC to outperform schedule-aware allocation from a fixed pool. In most cases the GC is just generic C++ code anyway; that indirection is unnecessary.
An important caveat is that I mostly deal with throughput-optimized code. It isn’t latency-sensitive and this article is about low-latency code. Nonetheless, the schedulers require predictable execution at ~1µs granularity for throughput optimization purposes, which is difficult to guarantee in Java.
I can write highly optimized code in C++ in a straightforward way that doesn’t really have a Java equivalent because equivalent guarantees are not provided as a practical matter.
TBH, even when I wasn’t trying to performance-engineer code I’ve never seen Java run as fast as the equivalent C++.
> There is no possible way even in theory for a GC to outperform schedule-aware allocation from a fixed pool.
You mean in the absence of any reference-counting overhead? That doesn't sound like a fair comparison.
> In most cases the GC is just generic C++ code anyway; that indirection is unnecessary.
You can't use the JVM's GCs from C++. C++ heavily relies on RAII, so it doesn't seem like a good fit anyway. I'm not aware of any serious efforts at a high performance GC for C++.
As Herb Sutter points out, moving GCs require non-stable pointers, which C++ isn't suited to. [0]
> the schedulers require predictable execution at ~1µs granularity for throughput optimization purposes, which is difficult to guarantee in Java
Can't say I know much about that kind of issue, how does it work in C++ code?
I recommend his recent appearance on the Inside Java podcast, where these topics are explored well. The episode is number 59, titled Java *is* Memory Efficient.
always CAN be given one is a sufficiently experienced C++ developer, with sufficient time and effort (both for the first iteration, and for every future maintenance).
The stars rarely align well on all counts and one may very well be better off with a close-enough, cheaper Java version.
Note that Prasad didn't reject their application: he prevented Moderna from even applying. Prasad overrode a phalanx of FDA career scientists who had studied and approved Moderna's study approach and were ready to review it. He did so suddenly and without warning: the FDA up to that point had not raised any concerns about Moderna's trial protocol. He didn't cite any safety or efficacy issues.
This wasn't the only time he stepped in and overrode experts with seemingly no justification. Just the most prominent example.
I have perfect pitch (or as it is more properly called, absolute pitch). To be honest, I am doubtful that these teach-your-kids-perfect-pitch techniques are effective: I don't think there's much evidence that they are, beyond anecdote.
Perfect pitch is more a parlor trick than anything. Sure, it's impressive, and I wouldn't trade it away. But the most important skill that a musician can develop (and any musician can develop it) is good relative pitch, that is, the ability to identify notes once told a baseline note. But people with perfect pitch are usually terrible at relative pitch.
For example, I was in a sightsinging class long ago, with one other student with perfect pitch. Sightsinging is a course designed to develop relative pitch. The professor would play a note, say, C, tell us it's a C, then proceed to play a series of chords. The relative pitch students would work out the chords based on the C. I and the other perfect pitch student would just write out the notes we heard. The professor got angry about this, so he started starting with a C but telling everyone it was, say, an F#. Then he'd play chords relative to the C and everyone but us two would write them all out relative to F#. The perfect pitch students were totally hosed, desperately trying to transpose the notes in real-time, with our brains constantly telling us that they're all wrong, and because our relative pitch was so bad as we had relied on perfect pitch as a crutch.
This also shows up in jazz. I'm a Jazz pianist and the thing I can't do is transpose in real time. That's a CRUCIAL ABILITY for a Jazz musician. But I can't do it because my perfect pitch keeps telling me the notes I'm reading are not the same that I'm hearing.
When I occasionally visited my parent's church services, the organist, who knew I had perfect pitch, would see me and immediately transpose the organ down by one half step with a dial. I then wouldn't be able to sing anything -- all the notes in the book were wrong. I'd look up and see him grinning at me. He knew that I knew, it was just between us two. He had screwed me over.
Starting around 50 years old, my pitch has started going sharp. This is a very common effect of age in people with perfect pitch. It depends on the instrument: sawtooth waveshape instruments (guitars, violins, harmonicas) are much worse than others. I'd hear a guitar at B and it sounds like a C.
It is hard to explain how disturbing this is. All your life you could recognize colors. People around you, who only saw in monochrome, would show you a blue object and you'd say "that's blue". This amazed them, but to you it just looks blue. But then one day someone shows you an object that looks blue, but it's not. It's green. The green meter confirms it. But it LOOKS BLUE. You can't explain why this is so disturbing because to everyone else it just looks gray. This effect has a strong psychological impact too -- I've seen interesting studies on it -- because the ego has been wrapped up tightly with your perfect pitch, and now it's failing, like a piece of you going wrong.
Well, I'll tell you one fun item. My teenage kids are practicing the piano downstairs. I hear a very wrong note being played over and over. I yell down to them what note they're playing wrong and what the correct note likely is. My kids take this in stride -- it's just the thing that their Dad does -- ugh, it's Dad again. Then they occasionally get reminded by their music teacher that it's not normal for a dad to do that. :-)
Though I really am terrible at the Theremin, perfect pitch helps a lot there too. I can walk up to a Theremin and pretty much nail the note despite its current settings.
In indian music, swaras only ever exist as relative pitch markers and as such even if you do have perfect pitch it doesn't impede anything. It just comes in the back of your mind as a separate thing like oh, this is 5, this is 1.5, etc, since they are different markers from the Sa..Pa..Sa...
These are waaay too complicated. Web developers can't even handle the easy stuff. My email address is of the form sean@foo.bar.baz, and email address validators on websites reject my address about 30% of the time because it has two periods.
I'd probably also have a red warning line under the input field for something really fishy and also most common typos (like "gmail.con") but other than that, I'd let it through.
Just had to update this this week - a previous dev had used 2,4 and someone came through complaining with a six character domain suffix. Apparently 24 or so is the current limit for a real domain suffix.
Even that's not the true length limit of a label in the Domain Name System. (RFC 1034 § 3, for the curious.) So someone is likely going to be fixing that, years down the line. Then of course there's the fact, as called out earlier, that there can be more than 2 labels in a domain name.
Realistically, the length of the domain part is likely ultimately constrained by how large a domain name can fit into a DNS/UDP query packet (alongside EDNS0).
Realistically, people would need to go out of their way to have an e-mail with the domain part longer than a hundred ASCII characters (although considering Punycode, this limit perhaps should be more like 200, for CJK domains...) so if they do, well, it's their problem.
I just don't like the idea of allowing to paste 20 MiB-long text into the input field for what normally is a "short line of text", so there should be some upper limit.
Yes there should, and the maximum size of what fits into a 512-octet DNS/UDP query packet, less header and EDNS0 and whatnot, is going to be that limit, ultimately. Because SMTP-based Internet MTSes that do not look up MX resource record sets in the DNS, and do not begin at DNS/UDP, do not currently exist. (-:
Even if they magically all switched to starting at DNS/TCP, that is still only 64KiB less header and EDNS0 and whatnot. And in that case one also has to allow space for sending the actual resource record set back in the response, DNS/TCP not having DNS/UDP's luxury of truncation, so it's not even as large as that.
I've actually looked at RFC 1034 § 3 you've mentioned in another comment, and it states
To simplify implementations, the total number of octets that represent a
domain name (i.e., the sum of all label octets and label lengths) is
limited to 255.
Which, AIUI, corresponds to maximum of 253 ASCII characters (including dots) in the common "subdomain.domain.tld" string format. So "\.{1,100}@\.{1,253}" it is (because, again, it's probably very likely that I wouldn't want to interact in the first place with people who think that the local part of their e-mail having more than a hundred characters is reasonable).
I own what could possibly be the coolest folding bike ever made: the Bike Friday Tikit Hyperfold. It has a folding mechanism with an extremely high nerd quotient. It has a reputation as the fastest bike to fold and unfold, requiring no latches, safeties, or adjustment at all. But more importantly, unlike many other exotic folders (ahem Brompton) it largely uses standard parts. You can fit it with whatever drivetrain, brake system, handlebars, pedals, and seat you want. Though it has the same 349 wheel size as a Brompton, it rides much, much better. It was designed by in conjunction with Bike Friday by Rob English, a mechanical engineer who long was (maybe is?) the British speed record holder.
But Bike Friday no longer manufactures it: the frame design is so exotic and weird that they had a number of frame issues and failures they had to overcome in the field, and Bike Friday has a lifetime frame warranty. It was a very popular bike, but by the time they had worked out all the kinks the value of them continuing to sell the bike had probably gone negative. The Tikit was just too bleeding edge for its time.
The Tikit relies on a special part in order to be ridden: its hyperfold cable. This cable is no longer being manufactured for Bike Friday and cannot be obtained anywhere. When my cable gives out, and it'll happen sometime soon, my Tikit will probably wind up on the display wall of a bike store. And I'll be searching for something to replace it. But there is no folder even close to the Tikit in sheer engineering prowess, which depresses me to no end as a tech guy. Bike Friday itself replaced the model with the Pakit, a decidedly inferior bike. I'm not sure what to do.
Praised by whom? The btwin folder is a low-rent and low quality version of a Dahon-style Chinese fold-in-half folder. That folding design is about 95% of the folding market, and has no clever design features whatsoever. It is simple to manufacture, has no patents, and is pretty bad in general riding use. It is neither fast to fold nor compact, and is very bad in customization, particularly with regard to the rider's reach. And it is really, really boring. Dahon and Tern have some okay bikes of this design, but the entire rest of the design category is dominated by bikes of quite poor quality, including the btwin.
The Decahlon folder folds faster than a Brompton. A friends of mine has both and he's trying to convince me on buying the cheap decathlon bike over a Brompton. The demonstration was convincing.
I'm a big fan of the fact that you can push a Brompton while folded. A feature that other folders miss.
You can push folders that lack the Brompton's rack-rollers design with a little practice. If you watch the Bike Friday video you'll see the guy do it, though it looks like that bike's folding seat post makes it a bit more difficult than on a cheaper folder. I push my folded Zizzo around no problemo.
Praised by most customers, probably. As an engineer I appreciate Bike Friday's attention to detail and I own a good few "artisan" devices myself, but the reality is that most people want a mass-produced bike that is "good enough" within their budget.
There's no doubt that your bike is higher quality than the Decathlon one, but the average customer doesn't appreciate how well engineered it is or how many patents (??) are involved.
Having lived in Italy and used the btwin folder quite a lot, I can assure you there are lots of basic folders in its category and price range which are much better. I'd look into Dahon and Tern for a basic folding bike.
Folding bikes are complex and hard to make safely, and the folding mechanism is costly to engineer right. This means that the manufacturer of a cheap bike is either providing you with a dangerous folding mechanism, or is putting a lot of the cost of the bike into the folding mechanism, so there's not much money left for the rest of the parts. Either way, it means that cheap folding bikes are a bad choice, and the btwin folder is a good example of that.
Some data points: I bought a Decathlon folding bike (Fold 500; new, ~450€) a few months ago. Using it many times a week (probably more than it's intended).
N=2, but my Decathlon bikes have well over 50000 km between them with no issues, beyond the usual wear and tear. Value wise, they are fantastic. They are road bikes, however, not the folding specifically.
This is what a lot of people want to be true, but in fact is not. I believe it can be mostly explained by the "IKEA effect": any given model is bought by so many people that the inevitable design defects are quickly found and remedied.
It folds the rear wheel “triangle” (red in the picture) underneath to make it shorter to fit in a car trunk, and quick-releases the seat IIRC. Also has squishy rubber-lump suspension because the rear wheel pivots.
(ICE being Inspired Cycle Engineering in this context).
I've had a regular Tikit (there's a single knob to lock the steer tube in place, adds 10 seconds to the fold/unfold time) for over 15 years. Picked Bike Friday because I wanted a foldable to be able to take it onto public transit, and the Bromptons were pricier than I wanted. I did have a frame failure early on (repaired thanks to that lifetime warranty), but it's been reliable ever since. If your hyperfold cable does break, I hope at the least you'll be able to retrofit the regular locking knob onto it.
Hi fellow tikit owner! When they did the early upgrade of the cable, I thought it was just some gauge of airplane wire, threaded through the front nut and clamped or welded in place (I don't rude mine very often, it's a very early model and has a lot of the weaknesses like chain offs, and it comes unfolded too easily when I roll it). But I haven't been able to bring myself to sell it, it's still such a nice little device.
I still think the strida folding bikes are the ones with the highest nerd quotient. Never ridden one myself, but been tempted a couple of times. In particular the low weight compared to any other folding bike is appealing. Unfortunately they are difficult to find for test rides and they look quirky enough that I'd want to do a test ride before buying
The strida is certainly the *dorkiest*, not nerdiest, looking design, but in terms of engineering, it's very bad. It is terrible, TERRIBLE to ride, with horrible mechanical trail. It is extremely unstable. It has no gearing options at all and has essentially no standard parts. It is very clearly the outcome of a designer rather than an engineer ("Let's start with the idea of a bike that folds like a ladder").
It's definitely weird to ride -- I would ride it on a commute of more than a few miles. It's less stable than a real bike, but not completely unstable. e.g. I can fall of curbs but can't jump up them.
Most body parts are specialty, not the brakes system, I believe.
It meets its design goals very well:
- Internal brake cables and quick release mean it folds very fast and doesn't get tangled up.
- It can be rolled around when folded so you don't have to lug it.
- It stands tall and thin so only takes the space of a small standing passenger on transit.
That's not what stability is. A stable bike is one in which the steering is stable and easily controlled at various speeds. It's a function of steering geometry and mechanical trail. And the Strida is among the very most unstable folders on the market.
Answer honestly. Would you ride the Strida downhill at a 30 degree incline with a serious curve at the bottom without using the brakes, like you would a mountain bike? How about at over 15 miles an hour [like a racing bike]? A good folder should be able to do both easily.
I ride mine 2 miles a day, sometimes 3 based on a variable commute. Mine doesn't have gears or a spedometer so I can only say I am comfortable at the fastest speed I can pedal -- but it would feel unstable to go much faster, say, on a very steep hill.
I'm not trying to imply it feels like a weirdly shaped mountain bike. I'm saying it does its particular job very well. The seating position and narrow handlebars definitely preclude it doing anything other than getting you from the train station to work on urban streets.
I have a real bicycle, too for, well, actually riding a bicycle.
When I was at nerd school in the 80s. This was a super-popular intracampus (and occasionally extracampus) transportation option. I never managed to learn myself.
It's true to some degree now. But it wasn't very true -- or expected to be true -- back when train lines were being established. That was during westward expansion.
It's generally regarded that Hong Kong has the best subway in the world. There are many reasons for this, but one cannot be overstated: Hong Kong's geography. A huge portion of the city consists of long thin urban corridors sandwiched between mountains and the sea. As a result, Hong Kong need concentrate its funding on only a few subway lines to support a huge portion of the population.
This good article aside, I wonder if the same thing is true about Japan when we're talking about long-distance trains. Compared to France or Germany, Japan is basically a stick. A very large chunk of the populace lies on a single train line running from Kagoshima up to Hakodate, running through Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto, Yokohama, Tokyo, Sendai, etc. So you can slap a single bullet train line there and service all of them.
I think you're broadly correct and that's definitely a reason, and I have another example to support it.
Mumbai too has a very similar structure (the core city is basically a peninsula that goes north-south). Our railway lines run N-S as well, with (till the recent Metros) feeder roads connecting them.
Mumbai is also one of the most densely populated cities in the world (#2 by some metrics).
Our local railways have an annual ridership of 2.26 billion [1]. Pretty much everyone agrees they're vital to the city.
Yes. You get a lot of bang for your buck as far as the number of people served. Hong Kong is less than half the area of Rhode Island, but the populations are 7.5 million for Hong Kong and 1.1 million for Rhode Island. Small area plus high population density is the situation where trains are most valuable.
The Hong Kong Metro is also very well planned, architected, and generally well run operationally. So much that the MTR corporation actually offers international consulting services. And for two decades, they have consulted with many mainland Chinese metro systems, hence it's no coincidence that the Shanghai and Shenzhen metros both look and feel very similar to HK's.
That is a good point but I think it doesn't apply everywhere.that has a similar shape. New Zealand has a similar shape but without railways interconnecting cities. You cannot cross the country, the islands, or even regions by train.
I think this could be a variable to contribute to a good coverage and infrastructure... but there are probably more factors involved.
The population density is probably one factor. New Zealand has 5.34 million people in 103,000 square miles. At the other extreme you have Hong Kong with 7.5 million people in 430 square miles. Each mile of track gives service to a much larger percentage of the population in Hong Kong than New Zealand. The same goes for a lot of the United States. The coastal corridors in the United States are population dense, but the interior less so.
Population density is one thing. Another issue is timing.
New Zealand was a really young country when railway technology came along, and didn't really have enough time or money to invest in a good railway network before other technology came along.
Airplanes are the perfect technology for NZ's geography, because they just fly over everything. There are actually a few places in NZ that received passenger airline service in the 30s before they received a railway connection (namely Gisborne), and many other places that never received railway connections.
At the same time, NZ was one of the fastest adopters of the automobiles, second only to America.
I think viable cars and airplanes had taken another 25 years to arrive, NZ might have had a much more complete railway network, with a much better chance of surviving intact into the modern era.
Didn't know about these historical facts, looks like timing really contributed to the current situation in New Zealand. When I was in Auckland some years ago, I remember NZ trying to bring some railway services back, before the pandemic.
I never got to travel on these, but I'm hoping to do that when I'm there again, probably next year. I see the website is still the same, so if anyone is going to NZ: https://www.greatjourneysnz.com/.
And to be fair, looks like you can more or less cross the country, as long as you don't plan to get all the way to Invercargill.
The railway services NZ are trying to bring back are regional commuter services. Auckland to Hamilton (now in operation); Auckland to Tauranga; Wellington to Palmerston North (Capital Connection, has been in operation for 35 years, about to be upgraded to battery-electric trains, since only half the route is electrified).
And also the vague idea of local rail service around Christchurch (interestingly, a private company bought the old DMUs from Auckland's local fleet after electrification and are just starting to run special trains for Rugby games).
Part of the problem is that there is only really only three metro areas in New Zealand. Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Everything else isn't really large enough to provide enough demand for a proper intercity route. And Christchurch isn't even on the same island, so you can't have a proper intercity train with the ferry getting in the way.
So the only potentially viable intercity route is Auckland to Wellington.
And apart from Hamilton and Palmerston North, (which already have commuter trains) there is absolutely nothing in the middle. The same distance in Europe or the US's eastern corridor would service 4-6 decently sized metro areas, and provide plenty of extra demand.
There just isn't enough potential demand to put a high-speed rail line through there. And without the high-speed rail, it's a 10 hour train trip that has zero chance of competing with a 1 hour plane ride.
Christchurch to Wellington is even worse. 6 hour train ride, at least an hour waiting for the ferry, 3.5 hour ferry ride. The plane does it in at little as 25 min in the air, there isn't enough time to reach cruising altitude. There is a reason why the route used to be serviced by an overnight ferry.
> And to be fair, looks like you can more or less cross the country, as long as you don't plan to get all the way to Invercargill
Yeah... but those aren't "intercity trains". They are scenic tourist trains that just so happen to be running along old intercity routes. Not bad as a tourism experience, but overpriced and not optimised for transportation needs.
The fact that you can't book both the Interislander ferry and costal pacific on the same website is very telling. They are literally run by the same company.
Same company that's providing the Rugby special trains, but this is using the old Capital Connection rolling stock. The train usually runs day trips up to Arthur's pass for cruise ships, but when there is a gap in that schedule they are running these Christchurch to Dunedin and Christchurch to Invercargill excursions.
I remember the announcement some years ago of the Auckland-Hamilton train. I think initially it had limited schedule, but from what I recall the usage was quite good after the launch (I think it was before or just after the pandemic). Good to know it's in operation now.
> And also the vague idea of local rail service around Christchurch (interestingly, a private company bought the old DMUs from Auckland's local fleet after electrification and are just starting to run special trains for Rugby games).
Hadn't heard about this! Interesting, and good idea to have a service for the games.
> So the only potentially viable intercity route is Auckland to Wellington.
This one would probably be quite busy. I had to fly Auckland-Wellington quite a bit as an engineer, and our managers & executives travel quite more (NIWA, a CRI that now I believe has merged with another one and changed its name).
Eventually I had to go to the capital to vote or for the embassy, or for a tech event. All these trips were always via airplane, but I'd be happy to get a fast train or a night train as in Europe.
Learned another new thing, thank you! I plan to go to Invercargill when I visit again to see if I can see the Aurora Australis or maybe check out where they have the MetService radiosonde launch. From what I recall MetService used to launch one from Invercargill near the airport (or I could be confused with a weather station or another climate monitoring station they had there).
What about options for those living up north? When I was still in Auckland some of my co-workers were looking into moving further West/North (there were too many people moving to South Auckland/Raglan/Hamilton at that time). But I remember the transport options involved one or more buses, and a ferry in the case of a co-worker that bought a house in... Hobsonville I believe. But the ferry didn't run all days, and had a limited schedule compared to the one for Waiheke or Devenport. Has that improved?
I always thought it'd be nice if there was a short train line connecting Devenport to Cape Reinga, as all the times I went to Cape Reinga or to take someone to Russel I'd have to drive or find a private shuttle.
I agree that if you put a high-speed line between Auckland and Wellington, and get the travel time down to 3-4 hours, people would use it. It would actually be faster than going to the airport for central Auckland, or anything further north.
But high speed lines are expensive, and NZ just doesn't have anywhere near the population density to justify it.
As for night trains, I'm pretty sure they can only exist where they are bridging multiple viable day train routes. Which is why that huge gap between Hamilton and Palmerston North is an issue.
And the route might actually be a bit short for a night train. If they electrified the entire distance (instead of using a diesel the whole way despite the fact 80% of the route is electrified) and did some improvements, they could probably get it down to an 8 hour trip.
> What about options for those living up north?
TBH, I'm not a fan of Auckland and don't really know what's going on with local public transport.
Geography like that does help a lot, it’s part of the reason it’s so easy to do really good high-speed rail in Italy over somewhere like Germany that is way more spread out. But it’s only half the picture, you also need the political will to get it built!
The population density of Italy 201/km2 is lower then population density of Germany 241/km2, so from point of view of density, Germany should have more high-speed rail than Italy.
But because cars are major German export driver and car manufacuring is major employment in Germany, anything competing with cars has not much political support.
The population density of Italy 201/km2 is lower then population density of Germany 241/km2, so from point of view of density, Germany should have more high-speed rail than Italy.
That would be if kilometers of rail tracks scaled linearly with population density per unit area. My guess (based on no research at all) is it’s more that there’s a population density tipping point, and after reaching it rail development dramatically increases. I do also think you’re right about the influence of the German car industry.
I'm sure geography helps, but it's certainly not the driver for good train service design. Cities in Japan are definitely not laid out in thin lines, and there's not just a few routes in any given city. I was living in Nagoya back in high school, and its train lines are sprawling.
Side note, there actually isn't one shinkansen from Kagoshima to Hakodate, that route would take you on 5 different shinkansen lines: Kyushu, Sanyo, Tokaido, Tohoku, and Hokkaido. But I get your point.
Even if the geography isn't thin it seems like there are major US cities you could draw a route through that would have similar population distributions. Or at least good enough for the economics to work.
That’s arguably irrelevant to anything except the Shinkansen.
Switzerland has 8m people. Bay Area has 8m people. Switzerland is 1/4th as densely populated as the Bay Area (4x the size) yet they have 10x better transportation
The Swiss public transport system is a century-plus old at this point. Compare pictures of the Zurich tram system in the early 20th century with today - squint your eyes and you won't notice any difference.
That said, I'm willing to bet that San Fransisco and the surrounding communities had comparable public transportation in the 19th and early 20th century. While I can't speak for the bay area, you can still find exposed tram tracks in many US cities - Philadelphia, for instance.
The US's move from having the best to arguably the worst public transportation system in the world among developed countries is a lesson in disastrous government policy.
California is also like this for the most part. Bay Area has 8 m, Los Angeles area has 17 m, and San Diego area has 3 m. 28 out of 39 live in those three. Straight line.
With relatively little between the Bay Area and LA to serve as a viable customer base. Hence, a lot of the problems getting California HSR going. Imagine you had the Boston area and the Washington DC area and took out NYC and Philadelphia in the middle. You'd have the same issue. The Acela isn't the fastest rail service (in part because NYC is in the middle but Boston to NYC and NYC to DC are a lot more practical than the whole route. I did it once when I wasn't in a hurry but it was because I could afford the time.
To an extent, a good train service can _create_ stuff. A while back, Irish Rail increased frequency on the Dublin-Belfast intercity train service. This had the side-effect (apparently unexpected) of kind of turning Newry (which is across the border in Northern Ireland) into a commuter town for Dublin. The Cork line also has a bunch of commuter towns which are on the face of it weirdly distant from Dublin, because the train compresses the distance.
I'd assume that similar will happen with California HSR (which would be a far better service than either of the Dublin intercities above); it would make living in intermediate stops and working in LA or SF far more practical.
Isn't this Japanese Railway Thesis that with the railway you build something in that "very little between"? Have the railway company buy up up all that cheap land, develop it into commute hubs with their own walkable retail and use that to fund the railway.
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