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How far can you go by train in 5h?

chronotrains.com

21–30 of 45 posts

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

#21

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…

Then again faster travel often results in more sprawl, less dense neighborhoods and does not reduce average travel time very much.

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.

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

#22
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.

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

#23
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.

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

#25

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 en…

It’s close to instantaneous on an iPhone SE?

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

#26

I like clicking on Paris. Looks good and runs well on my iPhone.

Isn't it possible to reach London from Paris by train?

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.

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

#27

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…

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…

The "1-2 hours of commuting every day" he gave is a pretty good (inverse) metric for quality of life.

Edit: Not as in, 1 hour of commuting is good, but as in, commuting time is a good way to measure quality of life.

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

#28

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…

"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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city

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

#29

I like clicking on Paris. Looks good and runs well on my iPhone.

Isn't it possible to reach London from Paris by train?

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).

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

#30
post #23

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.

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

Which region are you talking about?

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