How far can you go by train in 5h?
chronotrains.com
chronotrains.com
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 on trains and cars. Today, travel in London still averages 12 mph. People still spend 1-2 hours most days travelling.
Planes with jet engines have a big boost to international travel speeds, but the fact they cannot be landed in your backyard means the average travel speed (including getting to and waiting at the airport) isn't great. And when they are expensive, they aren't used much, so don't impact the worldwide average much.
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.
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 hours etc.
Number of people able to access necessary points of interest per hour per joule of energy used in that trip
Also there has to be a point where you use so much space and energy for transportation that you will not be able to have any given unit of area support a lot of people.
Edit: Not as in, 1 hour of commuting is good, but as in, commuting time is a good way to measure quality of life.
People trade off travel time for other benefits.
Like air quality, for example. It's important, but pretty much everyone living in a city trades it for something else.
* 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.
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.
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.
That will never happen though. The aircraft world is ossified with regulations, and isn't the sort of industry a VC backed startup can swoop in and disrupt Uber style.
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).
The distance you can travel on Monday morning at 9am differs greatly from the distance you can travel on Thursday at 3am, for example.
I've long thought it'd be useful to have that kind of information incorporated into gas station / charge station maps. IE: from a given position, how long will it take to travel to the nearest fillup station that will be open when I get there.
Which region are you talking about?
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.)
And memories. I miss the train from NY to Greenwich, CT. Or down to DC.
And Seattle to Portland, OR or to Vancouver, BC were both treats, too (with the exception of the slow Starlight northbound outta LA!). Treat trips with scenery and drinks!
Where I am now, it's an hour's drive to an Amtrak station and then several more to Chicago, the closest big city. Still pleasant, except for all the car.
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.
However, it's difficult in this form to choose a station: for big cities with many stations, you have to zoom in quite a lot to target one, but then with the zoomed view you can't see all the reachable stations...
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 end of the road.
We have to remind ourselves, that performance is the number one feature of Computing. If you sacrifice performance for easier development, you are working in the past.
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.
Not relevant to Italy though, where trains (when they start, which is not a given) never-ever keep their schedule. Sigh!
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.
Even with bad traffic it takes longer for me to take the Metrolink to LA than if I drive. Up until recent gas price increases it was more expensive too. I haven't experienced rail service on the east coast, but at least in my experience on the west coast it is horribly broken. I say this as someone who believes in it and wants it to be successful. I have given it so many chances and it has failed me every time.