Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand the emphasis on air travel I frequently see in these discussions. Passenger planes are much more fuel efficient per passenger-mile than single-occupancy cars. Most people drive far more miles alone each year than they travel by plane. It makes no sense to me to criticize someone for flying a couple thousand miles at ~100MPG when the average American drives 12,000 miles per year at ~25MPG. Beyond th…
The one that gets me is the suggestion that direct flights are more efficient. Sure, if you go from New York to Los Angeles, but it wouldn't make sense if you were headed to a smaller city away from a major centre. With millions to be saved, I'm sure airlines do a decent job of working out the most efficient combination of large direct flights and smaller commuter planes. I don't think a 3/4 empty 767 to Fargo is the…
It shows the transportation networks that arise if you assume that the link between two points gets better as more traffic uses it. It has different curves for the improvement which produce different patterns. Many of them produce the familiar hub-and-spoke model, all without any such notion in the underlying code.