[HN Gopher] TimeMaps (2017)
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TimeMaps (2017)
Author : metayrnc
Score : 138 points
Date : 2023-07-12 10:11 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vincentmeertens.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (vincentmeertens.com)
| psychphysic wrote:
| Heh just yesterday I was trying to work out how to make something
| like that for myself.
|
| Isochrone map and cartogram are interesting terms to lookup if
| desired.
| m_eiman wrote:
| I like the idea, but find the color bands a bit distracting since
| they're obviuusly incorrect - actual travel times are going to be
| shorter to navigation hubs and longer the further out in the
| network you get. It'd be more complicated to implement, of
| course!
| petercooper wrote:
| Agreed. These might be nice to have on the wall, but there are
| a lot of projects that have produced accurate maps over the
| years. A Google for "travel time map" brings up loads, such as
| https://app.traveltime.com/ which lets you make your own.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| This is why for this kind of map the geography is usually left
| as-is in one of the usual common projections, with a colour
| scale marking the time-distance, rather than distorting the
| geography.
| esquevin wrote:
| Reminded me of this map of france
|
| https://i0.wp.com/www.isoul.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/s...
| YkarinoKI wrote:
| In Japan, there exists a similar map created in 1970s by Yasuhira
| Sugiura (designer). It's not in English, but the image below
| depicts Japan from Hokkaido to Okinawa. The upper part is
| centered on Tokyo. The lower part is centered on Osaka.
|
| http://kousin242.sakura.ne.jp/maruhei/fff/wp-content/uploads...
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I remember seeing an isochrone map of the time it would take to
| reach different parts of the world in 1900, with London as a
| start point. I can't remember the actual times but it took weeks
| to get to Australia, and then additional weeks to get into the
| interior (few road and railways at then).
|
| It emphasized that travel to a foreign country, let alone
| emigrating, was massively more complex than today.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| > Due to the good public transportation in the Netherlands
| distance has become irrelevant. We can reach almost any
| destination by train easily and relatively quick.
|
| Well that would be nice, but unfortunately not true. Our public
| transport is tolerable, but Covid accelerated drastic cuts in the
| bus lines out in the country that (used to) go where trains
| don't. This has lead to the creation of 'on call' buses which you
| can reserve in advance if you want to go to one of the villages
| affected, but which mean that the projected itinerary can only be
| achieved in ideal conditions. Normally, if one link in your
| public transport journey is delayed, you just take the next train
| or bus, but with these on-call buses you are now missing the last
| leg of the journey, and have to wait at least on hour for the
| next opportunity (minimum time between reservation and minibus
| appearing). These maps don't account for this, because it is
| focused on train travel and the time-distance to stations.
|
| This time-maps are fun, but typical Amsterdam-centric thinking.
| And don't even bother trying to visit any bucolic place without
| train stations on a Sunday.
|
| On the whole, public transport in the Netherlands, trains
| included, are not in a very good position1. Partly due to the
| after effects of corona, partly due to a car-focused government.
|
| 1: Relative to neighbouring countries and pre-Covid conditions of
| course. This is still paradise compared to some countries.
| jlengrand wrote:
| Having seen the quality degrade in the 12 years I've been
| living here, I tend to agree that it's not as good as it used
| to be. Heck, 5 times just this month I had to go back home and
| pick my bike because the bus had been canceled and I couldn't
| reach a main hub any more.
|
| That being said, I've been living in other countries and the
| quality of service is INSANE compared to many other countries.
| We quickly forget how easy we have it.
|
| People take the train in NL like they take the bus in major
| cities in France. I hope it'll stay as good in the future, and
| the shortage stops at some point.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| _People take the train in NL like they take the bus in major
| cities in France_
|
| Could you please elaborate? (I am not sure I understood your
| comment)
|
| In France we do take trains on a regular basis, especially in
| major cities (the NL population is 17M, the paris region is
| 12M and largely crossed with trains)
| glompers wrote:
| I am pretty certain the parent's analogy was that (the non-
| Paris) French cities typically can fund bus service routes
| just as widely convenient as (the non-Amsterdam) Dutch
| cities typically can fund train services.
|
| It was not at all a putdown of France, which, after all,
| does fund many more long distance TGV routes out of
| geographic necessity; just a favorable comparison of how
| conveniently widespread the medium-speed train routes are
| in the average Dutch metropolitan region.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I disagree. Lots of small towns have excellent train and bus
| connections. The idea that proper public transport only exists
| in and around Amsterdam is preposterous and, well, simply not
| true.
|
| I agree that service to real small towns has gotten worse, and
| I agree that that's stupid. But a large share of NL's 400 train
| stations are in small towns too. Bus service to Tynaarlo going
| to shit does not mean that "public transportation time
| distance" is a useless, or "Amsterdam-centric" measure.
| berkes wrote:
| Service in small towns and villages has become worse (thanks
| to decades of free-market-politics). I live in such a
| village.
|
| But that, indeed, does not mean that public transport is bad.
| It's still very good. Just less good for a minority.
|
| My situation is that I always need (2x) extra 25 minutes on
| bike before I can hop on a train. A car hardly increases that
| speed. A taxi might be faster (due not having to park), but
| they are (always have been market-driven) unpredictable: they
| don't like driving to/from a small village.
|
| I often need "last-leg" journeys in remote areas too. Dutch
| public transport has excellent bike-services. I'll just grab
| a bike (OV-fiets) at the train-station and cycle to where I
| have to be. Sure, over 30-minutes makes the entire journey
| longer than car. But 25 mins bike + train@150km/h + 30 mins
| bike is most often still faster than a car. And I can drink a
| beer, code some stuff or watch a netflix on the train. And
| have 1:50m of light workout under the belt.
|
| Point being: maybe it's getting less-good. And it's good that
| people complain about that (if only they voted like this
| too). But most often this complaint is really little more
| than repeated hearsay; a pretext to keep driving in a car.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > At the same time, seen from a more remote and small village
| such as Stavoren the Netherlands is much bigger.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| The tiny town (not village) of Stavoren is fortunate enough
| to actually have a train station (not to mention a ferry link
| to Enkhuizen). That it still has a train link is a miracle in
| itself. A lot of those lines were on a razor's edge in the
| nineties, and if they had gotten replaced by buses (as was
| considered even for the larger towns of Harlingen and
| Franeker) they would have been harmed quite a lot by now
| (significant loss of tourism and being less attractive to
| live in).
|
| Try Lollum, Burdaard, or Earnewald by bus! Similar in
| population to Stavoren, no train, no dedicated bus line
| (anymore).
| gerad wrote:
| I just spent a week in Aalsmeer, which is a 40 minute bike
| ride from Amsterdam (or a 40 minute drive). Since it doesn't
| have a train station it was inconvenient to get anywhere
| without a car. That said, if you are near a train station,
| pretty much all the major cities are within 30ish minutes of
| one another.
|
| That said, I think it's more a function of the Netherlands
| being a small, flat and dense country than having great
| public transit. You could probably bike between most major
| cities in less than 90 minutes.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Interesting view of the Netherlands, but you can't reach
| most of the ten largest cities in the Netherlands within 30
| minutes by train or 90 by bicycle from most of the other
| cities. Eindhoven, Groningen, Tilburg, Breda, Nijmegen are
| all quite a distance from Amsterdam, and even the rail
| journey from Almere to Rotterdam takes over an hour.
| wcedmisten wrote:
| For generating an isochrone map anywhere in the world, I'm a big
| fan of this demo page:
| https://valhalla.openstreetmap.de/isochrones?profile=bicycle...
| pickledish wrote:
| Pretty similar idea but for NYC, I also like this one a bit more
| since it accounts for actual subway stops + walking, etc:
|
| https://subwaysheds.com/stop/g34/classon-av
| distcs wrote:
| > Due to the good public transportation in the Netherlands
| distance has become irrelevant.
|
| Is there some kind of global index that measures how good public
| transportation is in major cities of the world? It'd be
| interesting to which cities rank at the top.
|
| Can I request the well-traveled to share on this thread which
| cities they found to have the most excellent public
| transportation?
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Tokyo, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Paris, are all
| very good. There are obviously many more, but these I am quite
| familiar with.
| berkes wrote:
| Such a metric needs quite some thought, though.
|
| What is "good public transport"? A tiny village with 24 souls
| and one busline will probably have more "public transport
| opportunities per capita" than Tokyo. A very dense city has
| lower travel times than a spread out (or mountainous) city even
| if their "amount of PT" is exactly the same.
|
| As such, "good public transportation" either needs an entire
| bookwork to describe the metrics (and is therefore rather
| unusable), or is just a highly subjective metric.
| pushcx wrote:
| For more info and examples, the term for this is "isochrone map":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map
| bckr wrote:
| How would folks recommend implementing visualizations like this?
| I'm willing to program at a layer or two beneath "make an
| isochrone graph". My interests are more for visualizing embedding
| spaces such as those produced by RAVE or other VAEs.
| larodi wrote:
| Isochrone should follow the transport graph and is not just a
| nested circles (aka buffer) going out of centroid of shape...
| this article is somewhat misleading and also a bit sensational
| since people been doing isochrone analysis and maps for decades
| mlok wrote:
| Good idea. But not easily usable. The map distortion is funny and
| impressive but not practical. The (arbitrary) colored circles
| should be distorted to bring information, not the (familiar) map
| itself. We need the map to stay familiar so people are able to
| easily use this.
| vegabook wrote:
| Precisely. In fact the same time variable is being redundantly
| mapped to two visual dimensions, where one, colour, would have
| sufficed.
| ajaimk wrote:
| I'm a big fan of http://commutetimemap.com
|
| Same concept but using an actual map with time mapped to
| different modes of transportation from any address.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| That one was interesting, but seems to be missing some data
| about regional trains in Sweden. Even though commuter trains
| around Stockholm seem reasonably correct.
| [deleted]
| MattGrommes wrote:
| One thing I noticed when moving from San Diego to Albuquerque as
| a teen was how normal it was in Southern California to answer the
| question "How far is X?" with the answer "30 minutes". That was
| due to freeways and traffic rather than public transit but I
| definitely get the idea of these kinds of maps.
| darkstarsys wrote:
| There are better isochrones out there. I like this one for
| Boston:
| https://www.mapnificent.net/boston/#12/42.3584/-71.0598/2820...
| [deleted]
| sorokod wrote:
| Super cool, here is an app I'd like to see:
|
| Me and friends are in [Location] and are willing to travel no
| longer then [Time] to [some activity] - show all recommended
| places for [some activity] within radius [Time]
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(page generated 2023-07-12 23:01 UTC)