Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How far can you go by train in 5h?

chronotrains.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 45 posts

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

#31

Post by sokoloff »

flo123456 wrote: post #16
londons_explore wrote: post #13

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.

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.

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

#32

Post by choeger »

londons_explore wrote: post #13

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…

> 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.

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

#33

Post by noisem4ker »

spoonjim wrote: post #9
danybittel wrote: post #8

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…

This is a free website. How would you make it worth the author’s while to spend more effort to make it more performant?

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.

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

#34

Post by noisem4ker »

sofixa wrote: post #12
danybittel wrote: post #8

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…

> 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.

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

#35

Post by dreen »

tester756 wrote: post #30
dreen wrote: 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?

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)

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

#36

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

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.

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

#37

Post by throw0101a »

londons_explore wrote: post #13

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…

> 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:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant

* PDF: http://www.cesaremarchetti.org/archive/electronic/basic_inst...

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-29/the-commu...

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).

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

#38

Post by throw0101a »

flo123456 wrote: post #16
londons_explore wrote: post #13

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.

The 'remote' neighbourhoods, generally commuted via trains or trams, could themselves be designed to be walkable:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

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.

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

#39

Post by throw0101a »

dreen wrote: 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.

> Good luck in Poland, where an hour delay for a train is not a surprise.

Worth remembering this is not inherent to trains, as evidenced by countries who run their trains like clockwork, e.g., the Swiss:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPcHs-E4qc

Also the Japanese, who issue official apologies when trains leave 20-25 seconds earlier:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42009839

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44149791

(Presumably because people time their connections so closely.)

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

#40

Post by londons_explore »

mike_hock wrote: post #27
HPsquared wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

People trade off travel time for other benefits.

Post reply on HN