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How far can you go by train in 5h?

chronotrains-eu.vercel.app

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Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#121

Post by bobthepanda »

redtexture wrote: post #83
black_puppydog wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also shows an effect that the focus on high speed rail brings: rural areas are often very badly connected. Here in France they've even kept shutting down regional lines. That creates the train equivalent of "fly-over states": areas that you see from the train while going through, but that it would be impractical to go to .

This is the strong argument against high speed rail in the USA. We don't even have anything close to regional rail, and highspeed rail would consume all public capital that would be used to improve regional rail systems.

Existing freight rails are so bad that passenger rail should get its own pairs of tracks in many cases (both to be higher speed and to serve the places people actually live, work and shop), and if you’re going to the expense of building new you may as well build it to support higher speeds.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#124

Post by gregsadetsky »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #114
gregsadetsky wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it's very well done. Each isochrone is loaded from a static server/CDN -- for example https://chronotrains-eu.vercel.app/api/isochrones/7100002 -- and that bit of vector map data is then rendered using the mapbox gl/js frontend. Great work

Unfortunately it's been hugged to death. I wonder if it loads the entire set of isochrones when you open the page, given how incredibly responsive it is. I tried to share it with someone who would really enjoy it, but alas, no luck at all.

Aye, it is indeed down, that's sad.

The isochrones are loaded over the network on mouse hover. I thought that scheme would keep working and remain fast since the loaded vector data is completely static.

I guess the /api/isochrones/ url does point to some server-side code which couldn't keep up, unfortunately.

Actually, Vercel is returning "This Serverless Function was rate limited." and a 429 code i.e. too many requests. So it's more of a "hitting the limits of the Vercel plan" problem than anything.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#125

Post by School-Cotton »

aj7 wrote: post #116
maeln wrote: post #18

You can really see the Paris-centric approach in France: From Paris you can reach almost any other major city in 4h, but on the other hand, all the other metropolis can barely reach 1/4th of the other major population center in 4h. Compare this to Germany where almost any major metropolis can reach 80% of the country in 4h ...

These are countries the size of Oregon.

France is way bigger than Oregon (it's about the size of Texas)

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#126

Post by hannasanarion »

OJFord wrote: post #31
Robotbeat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact the US is basically empty means the cost to build a HSR route to go between population centers is super high because of the sheer distances involved. You’re talking like 1000 miles, not 200. The places which are closer together, like the East Coast, do have some passenger rail but they’re also much denser, like Europe, and so they have the same kind of constraints (or worse). The US has a lot of freight rail…

I don't know why this is down-voted so, but to me also outside the US it seems correct? You bill for travel between stations, there'd be a lot more track & travel between stations in the US, on average, if it were as ubiquitous. Intranational flight is a lot more common there. I imagine the economics of it are better, lower ticket price, and in many cases probably quicker too, even including airport BS.

Nobody's asking for an express train between Jackson and Billings. When you exclude the Mountain States and Alaska, the US has about the same population density as Western Europe.

There's no good reason for us to have zero public transit options between Atlanta and Savannah, Madison and Milwaukee, Columbus and Cincinatti, Denver and Colorado Springs, or Mobile and New Orleans.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#127

Post by redtexture »

js2 wrote: post #32
qalmakka wrote: post #22

As a European it boggles my mind seeing how trains are basically non-existent in the USA (just look at Houston station), given how dominant the whole "Wild West" railroad rush is in everybody's immagination. Railroads are super ubiquitous here, and we've to work with a pretty hostile terrain - Italy has lots of mountains, hills, rivers, and yet has one of the best networks in the world. Most of the USA are basically…

Italy compared to U.S.: https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTY3OTMzNjA.NTkxNzE... U.S compared to Europe: https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTc4NDEwOTE.MjkxMDg... My daughter, visiting home from college this weekend, took Amtrak from Richmond, VA yesterday. She's taking the train back Monday. Without delay, the train takes about 4 hours. Driving takes about 3 hours. Add an extra 15 minutes on each side f…

The IRS allows business travelers 58.5 cents a mile.

That is closer to your total cost of use of your automobile.

IRS 2022 Business milage rates:

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-issues-standard-mileage-rat...

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#128

Post by madcaptenor »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #79
Robotbeat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact the US is basically empty means the cost to build a HSR route to go between population centers is super high because of the sheer distances involved. You’re talking like 1000 miles, not 200. The places which are closer together, like the East Coast, do have some passenger rail but they’re also much denser, like Europe, and so they have the same kind of constraints (or worse). The US has a lot of freight rail…

The center of population in the US is still just barely to the west of the Mississippi, whenever people point out how vast and largely empty the US is, the leave out that the population itself is actually generally fairly close together for a majority of the country. You could easily have HSR all over the south, Midwest and NE, and then between population centers on the west coast, just likely not in the desert and w…

See for example Alon Levy's map of proposed HSR for the Eastern United States: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/02/10/high-speed-rai... They've actually done serious investigation of what's viable given typical costs and ridership of high-speed lines elsewhere in the world.

The high-speed bits they propose are basically a Boston-Atlanta-Chicago triangle with some ornaments (Chicago - KC, Chicago - Minneapolis, Cleveland - Pittsburgh - Philadelphia, and connections to Toronto, Montreal, Quebec), and separate networks in Florida and Texas. Connecting the Florida and Texas networks to the main one is marginal.

I'm not sure of their opinions on separate networks in the Pacific Northwest and in California, but I'm sure they have looked at it. I do recall them saying that it doesn't make sense to connect, say, Portland to San Francisco - there's just not much in between.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#129

Post by [deleted] »

qalmakka wrote: post #22

As a European it boggles my mind seeing how trains are basically non-existent in the USA (just look at Houston station), given how dominant the whole "Wild West" railroad rush is in everybody's immagination. Railroads are super ubiquitous here, and we've to work with a pretty hostile terrain - Italy has lots of mountains, hills, rivers, and yet has one of the best networks in the world. Most of the USA are basically…

[deleted]

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#130

Post by johannes1234321 »

majewsky wrote: post #33
stratom wrote: post #8

It also shows how much the train networks focus on domestic travel. In nearly all bigger countries it is possible to reach most bigger cities within the 5h. But journeys in this time-frame seldomly go much beyond the border. There is still much optimization potential for transnational travel in Europe's train network.

Wendover had a video on this topic just this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9jirFqex6g For a short summary, the basic problem is that rail infrastructure is paid for by national funds, so there is a bigger incentive to connect two places within the same country than to connect one place within the country to another place within a neighboring country. Wendover theorizes that the decoupling of rail networks fr…

Yes, funding is one thing. Other thing is that history of control systems and regulations is wild. For each border crossing you need different pantographs (some locomotives have four different pantographs for different countries), the engineer has to be able to identify different signalling systems, the train needs different computer systems for interpreting different control systems ...

There are initiatives like ETCS which partially improve the control situation, but even that has lots of national variations and takes ages to rollout.

Historic systems with little funding (relative to need) are fun.

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