31 ms·

How far can you go by train in 5h?

871 points by mritzmann 4y ago

why-el 4y ago
The app is currently non-functioning, I suppose the HN kiss of death (I assume the whole graph was too big to store in the browser?)
- activitypea 4y ago
  Yep, the client app is up but the API is returning 429 and 500
- sn0wtrooper 4y ago
  Hit the RATE_LIMIT of the hosted function.
- hnov 4y ago
  The app spams requests as you hover, but should be trivial to slap a cache-control: public, max-age=600 so it's served out of edge.
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
I'm clicking on these cities/populated train station names but don't see any colors populating. Using Chrome here.
dang 4y ago
Sorry for bringing up buses but that reminds me of this: Just how far can you travel by bus from London in 24 hours? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28262194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28262194 - Aug 2021 (128 comments)
butz 4y ago
Why some parts of Europe is missing, e.g. Greece? Source seems to have data for it. Also, it would be neat to see more countries of the world mapped out: Japan, US for a start.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  I'd be very interested in China's, given their recent work on high speed rail.
julian_t 4y ago
Halfway between LA and SF
marginalia_nu 4y ago
I can go about > Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). kilometers.
kitkat_new 4y ago
sadly it isn't using real transfer times I supposed it would be much worse in Germany if real data was used
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Interesting that it uses 20 minutes. I guess that's optimistic if you need to account for delays, but that's much longer than I often take to transfer (5 minutes often being workable if the trains are generally reliable, and you're able to catch a later train if you miss the intended one).
  - ben-schaaf 4y ago
    Swizerland (SBB) has some nice data on this with 98.9% connection punctuality, 40% of connections <5min and 77% under 10min. Though they might be an outlier here given the integrated timetable.
    - microtherion 4y ago
      Indeed the 20 minute interchange assumption interacts quite badly with Swiss schedules, because actual Swiss interchanges are routinely much tighter than that, so each is penalized with 30 or 60 minutes extra for the next connection.
  - majewsky 4y ago
    It depends on the station. If you're in Leipzig Central and you need to switch from platform 20 to platform 6, 5 minutes is very stressful because of the sheer number of platforms you need to walk past.
  - kitkat_new 4y ago
    doesn't this assume that trains constantly leave the station? In reality there is a train e.g. every hour or so, or even none at the same day
    - nicoburns 4y ago
yreg 4y ago
I think this should be rendered in 3D on a globe so it's easy to compare the covered distances between different places.
- jobigoud 4y ago
  If you use right-mouse-button it goes into perspective view but the Earth is flat...
goodpoint 4y ago
Sometimes city walkability is expressed more simply: each spot gets a color based on the size of the area that you can reach in a fixed amount of time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map So you don't have to manually explore the map.
stratom 4y ago
It also shows how much the train networks focus on domestic travel. In nearly all bigger countries it is possible to reach most bigger cities within the 5h. But journeys in this time-frame seldomly go much beyond the border. There is still much optimization potential for transnational travel in Europe's train network.
- black_puppydog 4y ago
  It also shows an effect that the focus on high speed rail brings: rural areas are often very badly connected. Here in France they've even kept shutting down regional lines. That creates the train equivalent of "fly-over states": areas that you see from the train while going through, but that it would be impractical to go to.
  - redtexture 4y ago
    This is the strong argument against high speed rail in the USA. We don't even have anything close to regional rail, and highspeed rail would consume all public capital that would be used to improve regional rail systems.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      Existing freight rails are so bad that passenger rail should get its own pairs of tracks in many cases (both to be higher speed and to serve the places people actually live, work and shop), and if you’re going to the expense of building new you may as well build it to support higher speeds.
    - awiesenhofer 4y ago
      > public capital that would be used to improve regional rail systems could be used, but we all know thats not how it works ...
      - redtexture 4y ago
        Commuter rail expansion and operations is the primary capital consumption area now, and there are more than a few such local / regional rail systems that could use several billion dollars each, on a continuing basis, for equipment, roadbed and station expansion.
ceejayoz 4y ago
"Not very far right now" seems to be the answer in Ukraine.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
baby 4y ago
Being in the east of France, it's a bit sad how misconnected we are with the west of France. (Lyon <-> Bordeaux you'd think can be done in 2 hours, but no it'll take like 6 hours).
- jobigoud 4y ago
  It's crazy, I can reach Strasbourg or Bruxelles from Bordeaux, but not Clermont-Ferrand…
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Fiahil 4y ago
  Yes, that's because everything here is centered on Paris
- jeffbee 4y ago
  I wish we had this attitude in California! Bordeaux is a city of roughly the same population and economic activity as Fresno, but there are many in California who still argue that Fresno should not be connected by high-speed rail to any place. California's cities are all arranged in a line, it should be the easiest high-speed rail project ever, but it languishes due to lack of imagination.
  - humanistbot 4y ago
    We're of completely opposite minds on this. A stop in Fresno should have been sacrificed so that California High Speed Rail could still happen for the majority of the state. Routing through the Central Valley was practically required for political reasons, and now the entire project has collapsed into a parody of itself. California's cities are not all arranged in a single line. They are in two roughly parallel lines, separated by up to hundreds of miles and across mountains. There are the coastal cities of SF, SJ, SLO, LA, and SD (follows highway 1) and the Central Valley line of Sacramento, Stockton, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, Lancaster/Palmdale (follows highway 99 mostly). The 5 is a compromise interstate that runs in between these two, and there is very little development there. If you've ever driven the 5, you know what I'm talking about. Even most towns "on" the 5 are a few miles away. The HSR line could have been drawn from LA to SF more or less following the 5, stopping at the outskirts of Bakersfield and then zooming straight through to a fork that stops next in either Gilroy (en route to the Bay Area) or Modesto (en route to Stockton and Sacramento). This would have been cheaper, shorter, and less encumbered by the need to get permits, approvals, easements, and the like from everyone in the Central Valley. Meanwhile, the chosen HSR route through the Central Valley runs through dozens of different counties, cities, tax districts, and regional planning agencies. Also, Fresno is far less dense than Bordeaux, and has a population that generally considers a mile to be a "long walk."
WaitWaitWha 4y ago
I delight in isochrone maps[0]! There used to be some open source, web interfaces but they all became commercial. An isochrone map is one of the best tools for weekend get-aways, job hunting, and finding a home location. OpenStreetMap[1]! Add it to your site, it will be great hit, in my opinion. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org https://www.openstreetmap.org
- cridenour 4y ago
  I ran a home search startup in 2015 and I will always remember the moment my searching finally came up with the name "isochrone" and the explosion of research and data that came with that. Our home search went from "we'll send you an email when its done" to adding fake loading bars to make it seem like it was doing more.
  - mwint 4y ago
    By 2015 Zillow was already well entrenched, what was your differentiator?
    - etskinner 4y ago
      Zillow doesn't have isochrones, for one. I long for a map experience that's more like a SQL query than a catalog, and Zillow's filtering leaves a lot to be desired.
      - matthewfcarlson 4y ago
        I agree, Zillow has lackluster filtering. I’ve been working on something similar for people looking for remote work and aren’t particular about where they live. How did the project end up? What were the good parts and the bad parts?
- jmkb 4y ago
  GeoApify[0] is one of these commercial services using OpenStreetMap data. They have a no-friction isochrone "playground"[1] that's sufficient for casual exploration. You can switch the travel mode to "transit" to include train routes, but the maximum travel time for the demo is capped at one hour. The results are very different, eg chronotrains-eu.vercel.app claims that Wittenberge is within an hour of Berlin Hauptbahnhof, but GeoApify won't take you further than Nauen. Possibly chronotrains-eu is showing a best-case travel time while GeoApify is attempting to calculate realtime travel using the current day's schedules? I doubt the main OSM site would ever host an isochrone demo, as it's more of a reference implementation of very basic map and routing features that OSM data enables. Notably, the routing demos there do not (yet) include any kind of transit mode. [0] https://www.geoapify.com https://www.geoapify.com [1] https://apidocs.geoapify.com/playground/isoline https://apidocs.geoapify.com/playground/isoline
caradine 4y ago
I'd love to see this for the U.S. as well, if only to highlight the contrast
maeln 4y ago
You can really see the Paris-centric approach in France: From Paris you can reach almost any other major city in 4h, but on the other hand, all the other metropolis can barely reach 1/4th of the other major population center in 4h. Compare this to Germany where almost any major metropolis can reach 80% of the country in 4h ...
- OJFord 4y ago
  Infamously similar in the UK, even despite being smaller. Particularly East-West travel anywhere much North of London. Many inter-city routes are via London. (I'm not complaining, j'habite à Londres ;))
  - xenocratus 4y ago
    > anywhere much North of London You don't need to go that much North - I used to live in Oxfordshire, trying to get to Cambridge for work was a joke (I don't drive). It would take 3.5h+ for a 140km journey from Oxford to Cambridge because train journeys were only through London (+ a railway station change), and there was only one coach that stopped in every town along the way (and which has been axed into two separate legs since the pandemic, making it 4h+ now). In the end I moved to London, so that's manageable now...
    - OJFord 4y ago
      I didn't mean much North! Heh, another of those BrE words like 'quite'. Oxford/Cambridge is a classic example, yes. (For those unfamiliar, they're like two spokes right next to each other on quite a small rim where London is the hub. But large enough (or close enough spokes) that 'in and back out' seems silly.)
      - ErikCorry 4y ago
        This is actually being fixed. Someone put huge telescopes on part of the old line, but they are building a new one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_West_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_West_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullard_Radio_Astronomy_Observatory#/media/File:Cmglee_Cambridge_MRAO_Half_Mile_Telescope.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullard_Radio_Astronomy_Observ...
marcosscriven 4y ago
I'd love to see the Eurostar on there. A colleague was stunned I could get from London to Brussels in two hours.
- joosters 4y ago
  It is on there - highlight Brussels and it’ll show that you can reach Newcastle within five hours. That’s only possible if you go via Eurostar.
NeoTar 4y ago
Sadly, the trains on the Isle of Wight (off the South Coast of England, south of Southampton and Portsmouth) is not included. I'd be interested in their perspective since you can buy a 'train' ticket which includes a ferry crossing, so the isochrone would either extend up to London and beyond (if you allow the ferry), or be restricted to just the island itself (if you do not).
qalmakka 4y ago
As a European it boggles my mind seeing how trains are basically non-existent in the USA (just look at Houston station), given how dominant the whole "Wild West" railroad rush is in everybody's immagination. Railroads are super ubiquitous here, and we've to work with a pretty hostile terrain - Italy has lots of mountains, hills, rivers, and yet has one of the best networks in the world. Most of the USA are basically empty, it would be pretty easy to build high-speed rail.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  The fact the US is basically empty means the cost to build a HSR route to go between population centers is super high because of the sheer distances involved. You’re talking like 1000 miles, not 200. The places which are closer together, like the East Coast, do have some passenger rail but they’re also much denser, like Europe, and so they have the same kind of constraints (or worse). The US has a lot of freight rail, and we use it. The Wild West mentality has gone away in the railroad industry which is now hyper-conservative and regulated. I do sometimes wish the US lived up to the Wild West stereotype the Europeans imagine. But no, we often have just as much stifling regulation (if not more), depending on where you’re talking about. But we do have gun violence, so there’s that.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    I don't know why this is down-voted so, but to me also outside the US it seems correct? You bill for travel between stations, there'd be a lot more track & travel between stations in the US, on average, if it were as ubiquitous. Intranational flight is a lot more common there. I imagine the economics of it are better, lower ticket price, and in many cases probably quicker too, even including airport BS.
    - ejb999 4y ago
      >>Intranational flight is a lot more common there. I imagine the economics of it are better, lower ticket price, and in many cases probably quicker too, even including airport BS. That is the problem in my opinion - I prefer sitting on a train, to sitting on a plane, but for most routes I need to travel (within the US) it takes longer to get there and is more expensive than flying - why would anyone want to pay more and waste more time? You either need to be faster or cheaper if you want my business.
phreeza 4y ago
So which starting point covers the largest number of people you can reach? I am guessing Brussels since it covers a good portion of the Blue Banana, plus Paris and other big French cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana
- nowahe 4y ago
  (Semi)surprisingly, Strasbourg looks like a good contender as well, as it covers a good portion of the blue banana, most of Germany, and about half of France
d--b 4y ago
This is great, but it would be better if the selection of the station was a textbox or a smaller map. Right now you have to zoom in to select a station, and then carefully zoom out to see the reach.
- emaginniss 4y ago
  Or if you could click to "lock on" to a station and then zoom out
ramboldio 4y ago
It's sad to see how disconnected the national railway systems are in eastern europe. Basically, 5h always fills the national borders but no further in Hungary, Romania, Poland etc E.g., train connections from Czech Republic to southern Germany are missing all together.
- nisa 4y ago
  > train connections from Czech Republic to southern Germany are missing all together. This is a huge problem IMHO. You always have to use the route via Dresden/Prague - it was different in the past - Would be really great if there would be some Eurocity Nürnberg-Pilsen or Munich-Budweis.
- klohto 4y ago
  We all have neglected the networks while claiming to have “the biggest rail network”. Well, now it’s the slowest, and probably the most underfunded. The missing connection to South Germany don’t make sense though. Just take a train to Berlin and take DB anywhere.
  - nisa 4y ago
    > The missing connection to South Germany don’t make sense though. Just take a train to Berlin and take OBB anywhere. It's the difference between 6-8h and 2-3h to reach a city in Czech Republic. However the tracks connecting Germany/Czech Republic in the south are not in good shape if I remember that correctly.
    - klohto 4y ago
      Sure, but the problem is on the Czech part. Once you're in Germany, it's pretty fast.
- yorwba 4y ago
  The Czech borders are fairly mountainous. If you start in Prague, there's a tentacle that just barely reaches Regensburg in Germany. It crosses the border in the gap between two mountain ranges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cham-Furth_Depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cham-Furth_Depression Building other routes would likely be possible, but only with a lot of tunneling. The Czech-Polish border is similar, I think.
88840-8855 4y ago
I would love to see the same map for China. They have a fantastic HSR network and great trains.
woodruffw 4y ago
For the Europeans on HN: on the East coast of the US, the furthest you can get by train in ~5h is roughly Boston to NYC, or NYC to Washington, DC. Both are roughly equidistant (~220 miles, ~354 kilometers). One of the perverse things with our passenger rail network is that you can actually take take trains that "only" take 2.5 hours, but: they run nonstop point-to-point, and any subsequent connection you make (e.g. to Richmond, a major city in Virginia) will be on a diesel train that shares trackage with CSX or another major freight line. The end result is that traveling the extra ~90 miles from Washington, DC to Richmond generally takes over 3 hours, when it should really take less than an hour.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  Boston to Philadelphia a closer approximation. The Acela is scheduled for 5h 1m for that trip. I travel between Boston and New York by train frequently, and even the slower regional service takes < 4 hours. Either way, still not a great comparison to Europe.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Sorry, this was confusing wording on my part -- I was trying to say that Boston/NY or NY/DC is consistently under 5 hours, and that just about everything else is over 5 hours, illustrating a gap in our network. NYC to DC is also consistently around 3.5 hours, even with the slower NE Regional.
    - fatnoah 4y ago
      Ah, gotcha!
- jonas21 4y ago
  ~50 million people live along the Boston to DC corridor. That's roughly the population of Spain, and not much less than that of France.
- DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
  With a modern high-speed rail line, you'd theoretically be able to get from NYC to Chicago in around 4:15, even when accounting for stops along the way. That's an average of 300 km/h. There are already lines in service elsewhere the world that are that fast.
danwee 4y ago
When people talk about how bad trains are in Germany and how good (relatively speaking) they are in Spain, well, one word: connectivity. Hover over any city in Germany and you'll see almost no gaps in the map. Hover over any northern city in Spain and you'll see no direct connection by train among them (!).
jbj 4y ago
Amazing map. Hovering around over South Sweden and North Germany, makes it quite obvious that the Femern tunnel will make a difference in connecting that area. Same for connecting north from Lombardy through the mountains.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Sweden-Denmark is already well connected too, but I hope that norway-swesen gets improved.
  - housingisaright 4y ago
    Sweden-Norway is getting improved, the railroad between åre-trondheim has been 2 separate trains due to the Norwegian train not being electrified. Which is now being worked on. Trains in the northern parts of Sweden will always be sparse due to the low population tho.
arnaudsm 4y ago
I'm impressed by the low latency, great job sir
- gregsadetsky 4y ago
  Indeed, it's very well done. Each isochrone is loaded from a static server/CDN -- for example https://chronotrains-eu.vercel.app/api/isochrones/7100002 https://chronotrains-eu.vercel.app/api/isochrones/7100002 -- and that bit of vector map data is then rendered using the mapbox gl/js frontend. Great work
  - Kon-Peki 4y ago
    Unfortunately it's been hugged to death. I wonder if it loads the entire set of isochrones when you open the page, given how incredibly responsive it is. I tried to share it with someone who would really enjoy it, but alas, no luck at all.
    - gregsadetsky 4y ago
      Aye, it is indeed down, that's sad. The isochrones are loaded over the network on mouse hover. I thought that scheme would keep working and remain fast since the loaded vector data is completely static. I guess the /api/isochrones/<id> url does point to some server-side code which couldn't keep up, unfortunately. Actually, Vercel is returning "This Serverless Function was rate limited." and a 429 code i.e. too many requests. So it's more of a "hitting the limits of the Vercel plan" problem than anything.
omega3 4y ago
This map is slightly misleading as the areas covered by the train stations are huge.
aj7 4y ago
Explains the explosive growth of European regional and budget airlines. Especially with excellent public transportation to airports.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
Nicely done!
thedudeabides5 4y ago
The next time we need to print $1Tr we should build a high speed rail from SF to NYC, via Detriot. #NeoIntercontinentalRailroad
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  You probably couldn't build HSR from SF to Detroit to NYC for a trillion bucks. But it would be an interesting project nonetheless. With strategic stopping points, I wonder how the population dynamics for the flyover states would change.
dimitrios1 4y ago
You can go from Edinburgh to London in 5 hours or less, that's pretty damn cool.
informalo 4y ago
Same thing for public transport in metro areas (great if you’re looking for a new place to live): https://www.mapnificent.net/ https://www.mapnificent.net/
- lkjaero 4y ago
  Sadly this site doesn't seem to be maintained still, there's lots of contributions that aren't getting merged. https://github.com/mapnificent/mapnificent_cities https://github.com/mapnificent/mapnificent_cities
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gield 4y ago
From Brussels, Belgium, you can reach in 5h: - Wales and deep into northern England (Newcastle - the whole western border of Germany - the south coast of France - Switzerland I was never into the whole "center of Europe" thing, but this puts things in a different perspective.
Jamie9912 4y ago
Is the website not working for anyone else? It says hover over a city to see the isochrones from that city. But when I do so nothing happens at all?
- fguerraz 4y ago
  Same here
- vultour 4y ago
  Looks like the API returns either 429 Too Many Requests or a 500 error, so it's probably hugged to death.
- dareiff 4y ago
  Too much traffic — all endpoints once on the page are erroring out.
- em3rgent0rdr 4y ago
  not working for me. Neither linux desktop chrome nor firefox nor android chrome.
phantomathkg 4y ago
Hug of Hacker News. Now all the API returns 429 error.
pahn 4y ago
I made an interactive art installation on this question once: A black box with a knob where you could adjust how much time you have, then it would offer you (Google streetview) panoramas of the locations it found within your distance, and in the end even print a paper slip with your travel itinerary to take with you. The installation used realtime data (Google directions API): I somehow figured out, that if I would run this from a local machine and reset the browser frequently, Google would let me do this even without an API key… they certainly sensed something was awry and I did get API warnings and captchas because of 'suspicious traffic on my network', but they were nice enough not to block me completely. I strongly doubt this would still work though, this was in 2017. Pictures and videos of the installation: https://maschinenzeitmaschine.de/derweil/ https://maschinenzeitmaschine.de/derweil/
- patrick91 4y ago
  that's a pretty cool project!
- ohg 4y ago
  Awesome
- mustacheemperor 4y ago
  I have been wishing Apple or Google maps would add this as a feature for at least five years now. When I’m in a new city for work, and I know I have 90 minutes til my next meeting, it would be massively helpful to see every lunch place in a 15-25 minute walking radius. The fact that there’s still not a “search/filter by transit time” feature in any Maps app seems like proof there’s not enough competition in that space in 2022.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jgust 4y ago
    I think what Maps really needs is more widgets that reduce the screen real estate of the map until we can finally drop that feature entirely.
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wgnmstr12 4y ago
There is a lot of what-if here, but the reality is that most people in the USA prefer the flexibility and speed of (1) Driving wherever and whenever and carrying all your stuff with you, and then (2) flying to your destination for speed. You can cross the east coast in 3 hours or the go to the west cost in 6 on a convenient red-eye. Taking the train is more a novelty, and unclear who would actually use it regularly because it takes much longer (10 hours east cost, 20 hours coast to coast), transport on either endpoint requires you to park or taxi, and you lose all flexibility. We like the idea of the train more than the reality of the train. I've lived in various places around the world where you had to take mass transit always, and all it does is add one to two hours to your commute when I would have much preferred to drive.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  You can still drive in Europe. Cars and roads still exist.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Not only that, cars are still more popular than trains. Wouldn't believe it from comments on HN, of course.
fstrazzante 4y ago
awesome project! I like it!
ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
Interface seems to be broken on mobile iOS.
- tomduncalf 4y ago
  You just need to close the instruction dialog which is obscuring the whole view
  - ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
    No — the actual controls on the map don’t work for me. If it works for you then it must be something weird on my device.
andbberger 4y ago
does switzerland dirty
sorenbs 4y ago
We really need Japan on this map :-)
barbazoo 4y ago
Beautiful visualization.
onionisafruit 4y ago
This is very timely. In September I will have four days of down time with my wife in Paris. We want to get out of town but don't know where. This gives us some options. If anybody here has suggestions where we can spend a few days taking in non-Parisian France, let me know.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  You can hope over and check out Geneva in Switzerland, very nice place.
- humanistbot 4y ago
  I really liked Strasbourg. France meets Germany in a compact historical center, 2hrs each way from Paris on the TGV. Just go when the EU government is not meeting there, because for 4 days a month, they all have to pack up from Brussels and move to Strasbourg. Reims and the Champagne region are on the TGV to Strasbourg as well, making that an easy day trip from Paris. There are also the night trains (Intercities de Nuit), which go from Paris to some destinations at the periphery of France that are way too long for a normal day trip. It is usually 4 or 6 bunks in a room, but you can pay extra to book the entire room for the two of you. Go to sleep in Paris and wake up 12 hours later in Nice on the Med coast, Briancon (ski resort town in the Alps, great in Summer too), or any of the medieval towns in the Pyrenees near Spain (Carcassonne, Narbonne, Perpignan)
  - onionisafruit 4y ago
    Thanks for the Strasbourg tip. That's one of the places I was looking at based on the map. The German cultural influence drew me in. Thanks to your comment I checked the EU schedule and found they will be in Strasbourg at the same time. I like the idea of a night train, but there is a significant chance either my wife or I won't be able to sleep. That would make the next day unpleasant, so we'll save the night train for some time when we have a few more days to spare. Now we are thinking Dijon.
  - nixass 4y ago
    Strasbourg will be a connector for Paris to Vienna line. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Line_for_Europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Line_for_Europe It will take 4hrs from Paris to Munich (900km)
gwbas1c 4y ago
FYI: I had to disable uBlock in order for the site to work.
gwbas1c 4y ago
I find the boarder between France and Span fascinating. It looks very hard to cross that boarder by train.
- deleted 4y ago
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Yizahi 4y ago
Ukraine data is incorrect, before latest invasion we had multiple semi-fast trains reaching 120-140 km/h between regional centers. Though if it is snapshot of current state of affairs then it can be like that, a lot of trains were canceled or slowed due to war.
kurthr 4y ago
You can also go Beijing to Shanghai in 4.5 hours. That's over 1200km or 750mi averaging above 260km/hr. I think it's the fastest long distance passenger service available and has the benefit of being central Shanghai to south-central Beijing (rather than north-east where PEK airport is). That made it noticeably better than business air travel between the two cities. You could also ride the Pudong maglev (at 430km/hr peak and 250km/hr average), but it was never extended from PVG to Jing An and the main Shanghai station. However, now you have to go through security at each end which adds at least 1.5hr, and that's ignoring pandemic restrictions.
- kurthr 4y ago
  Then there's Tokyo-Shinagawa to Fukuoko-Hakata which is 1100km and 4.75hr averaging 230km/hr, which is quite fast and easy to take with minimal waits.
  - rjh29 4y ago
    Will be even faster once they get maglev.
- DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
  The Beijing-Shanghai line now averages 292 km/h (that's including stops - the train's top speed is 350 km/h). Maybe even more impressive, the trains cover the first 1018 km, from Beijing to Nanjing, at an average speed of 316 km/h.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  Beijing to Hongkong is about 2,450km and takes 9h by high speed train, which is more than 270km/h average as there are a few stops along the way. I believe that the advertised speed is about 350km/h.
- qwezxcrty 4y ago
  Hmm, I don't think one needs 1.5hr to pass the pre-COVID China Railway security check. 5 min is the norm I experienced. Honestly, I doubt such security checks can deter determined terrorists.
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webnrrd2k 4y ago
3,353 × 10^9 miles, or 5 light-hours, is the absulute theoretical max. So, in practice, something less than that?
KronisLV 4y ago
> This map shows you how far you can travel from each station in Europe in less than 5 hours. Aww, seems like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia aren't a part of Europe, then. But jokes aside, the visualization itself is pretty cool, though it might also be really useful to be able to put emphasis on the actual train tracks, especially in the further zoom levels, though map implementations don't always allow this to be done easily, without too much customization or running your own tile server.
2dvisio 4y ago
Basically, just click anywhere on the south of Italy to understand how infrastructure investment can be done poorly.
notsapiensatall 4y ago
It would be interesting to see this for the US. You might be able to get from New York City to Boston within 5 hours. If you're leaving from Fargo, though, it would be hard to make it into neighboring Montana. Our best case for taking a coast-to-coast train is 72 hours, but I've never seen a long Amtrak train arrive on time.
bisRepetita 4y ago
Little usability nitpick: it is really hard for me to see the connection Paris - London (less than 2.5 hours in real life thx to Eurostar). You need to very precisely mouse over Gare du Nord, which is hard, since it seems hidden by the other train station and airport nearby. Not sure if at a certain scale, one should see all the conenctions form all the train stations in Paris?
- jobigoud 4y ago
  Taking into account metro and RER rides should fix this issue I think.
aidenn0 4y ago
I've had an Amtrak train delayed by more than 5h on the West Coast, so here at least the answer is potentially 0. I grew up in the NE USA where Amtrak is usable, if not up to European standards, so trains here are particularly disappointing.
huggin 4y ago
From Beijing to Shanghai, more than 1000 kilometers
alexott 4y ago
I can’t say that’s accurate. For my area it shows that Kassel is 3 hours away, although direct train goes in less than an hour, and even with intermediate stop, it’s slightly more than an hour. South of Germany isn’t connected at all, although I can get to Ingolstadt in less that 5 hours…
- have_faith 4y ago
  Similarly it told me Sheffield to London (kings cross) is 4 hours when it's a little over 2 hours normally. edit: I think I read it wrong wrong, it put a small darker ring around kings cross and I got 3hr and 4hr colours mixed up (:
szundi 4y ago
Useful after robbing a bank
Balgair 4y ago
It's funny that Ireland isn't on here considering it's the largest English speaking country in the EU now!
bergenty 4y ago
I don’t like trains though, it takes so long especially in a large country like the US. Great for recreation purposes or travel within places closer than 3 hours by car but not otherwise.
steren 4y ago
Nice. It doesn't seem to play very nice with cities that have multiple stations. If you hover Paris, Gare de Lyon gets selected most of the time. But if you zoom in, you can select other Paris stations (e.g. Gare de L'Est) which leads to different results
- jobigoud 4y ago
  And the station at CDG airport is quite hard to pick, but has much more penetration into the UK than Gare de Lyon.
micheljansen 4y ago
Very well done! I played around with this sort of stuff many years for a property search engine startup. I tried to make a “max commute distance” filter. It was much harder than I thought at the time!
thejackgoode 4y ago
Five hours, I assume, is the maximum amount of time an average person can enjoy sitting in a train. With overnight trains making a comeback, there are much more possibilities. I recently enjoyed falling asleep in Central Europe and waking up over the Alps near the sea. Trains are amazing.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  It’s more comfortable to be on a train than a flight and people are happy taking ten hour plus flights no problem.
  - Aachen 4y ago
    To be fair, you also get about three to four times the distance per minute out of it (850km/h pretty much the whole way as the crow flies vs 250 average if you're lucky plus curves). To be clear, I find it absurd that airplane companies are still allowed to sell tickets without pricing in externalities for trips with good and high-speed train connections like Paris–Madrid. However, for actually going somewhere far away there just isn't really another choice but to take that plane. Your only other choice is to never go there at all, or take out weeks of travel for a ship or something. It's still too cheap, at least those that go regularly can also afford for Climeworks to undo their environmental pollution, so I hate to be defending air travel here, but 10h flights are a different ball game than 10h train rides.
    - dieortin 4y ago
      The Paris-Madrid connection is not really good though, as you have to go all the way to the east of Spain and pass through Barcelona before heading west towards Madrid. Luckily, there are some lines under construction that will connect Spain to France through Irún, and which should make things much better.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Only because there are no viable alternatives to a 10 hour flight. But the alternative to a 10 hour train ride is a 1-2 hour flight.
jobigoud 4y ago
So what's the longest distance between two such connected stations?
maximilianroos 4y ago
Which city can you reach the most area in 5 hours? Top contenders: - Paris, Gare de Lyon (doesn't seem to include going to Gare du Nord and going to London in this?) - Brussels — can go as far as Newcastle or Avignon - Random ones in the center of Germany which cover all of Germany
- maximilianroos 4y ago
  If you zoom in to select London Kings Cross, I think that wins
jobigoud 4y ago
I just realized it's not symmetric. If you click Paris it highlights Perpignan (in the South), but if you click Perpignan it doesn't reach Paris at all. Same for Brussels and Newcastle.
- foota 4y ago
  Maybe express trains only go one way?
brunoluiz 4y ago
That is a very nice app and, funnily enough, I was doing this manually (via Trainline) yesterday after watching this Wendover Production video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9jirFqex6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9jirFqex6g. One suggestion for the app: allow us to pin a city when clicking on the desktop version ;)
germinalphrase 4y ago
On Amtrak? Based on my last attempt - that would be zero meters.
11thEarlOfMar 4y ago
I'd expect Japan to have the highest % coverage (though less square km than France). And the US to just be... humiliating...
presentation 4y ago
The borders really seem to hamper EU train travel, huh.
ittan 4y ago
I would recommend an edit to the title to include Europe.
deleted 4y ago
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timwaagh 4y ago
So it works now and I am sort of disappointed. I can get to Paris and London, which, don't get me wrong, is nice. But Paris is I think three hours and apparently I can't get to anywhere South of there in five.

871 points by mritzmann 4y ago

The app is currently non-functioning, I suppose the HN kiss of death (I assume the whole graph was too big to store in the browser?)

activitypea 4y ago
Yep, the client app is up but the API is returning 429 and 500
sn0wtrooper 4y ago
Hit the RATE_LIMIT of the hosted function.
hnov 4y ago
The app spams requests as you hover, but should be trivial to slap a cache-control: public, max-age=600 so it's served out of edge.

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

I'm clicking on these cities/populated train station names but don't see any colors populating. Using Chrome here.

dang 4y ago

Sorry for bringing up buses but that reminds me of this: Just how far can you travel by bus from London in 24 hours? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28262194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28262194 - Aug 2021 (128 comments)

butz 4y ago

Why some parts of Europe is missing, e.g. Greece? Source seems to have data for it. Also, it would be neat to see more countries of the world mapped out: Japan, US for a start.

ceejayoz 4y ago
I'd be very interested in China's, given their recent work on high speed rail.

julian_t 4y ago

Halfway between LA and SF

marginalia_nu 4y ago

I can go about > Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). kilometers.

kitkat_new 4y ago

sadly it isn't using real transfer times I supposed it would be much worse in Germany if real data was used

nicoburns 4y ago
Interesting that it uses 20 minutes. I guess that's optimistic if you need to account for delays, but that's much longer than I often take to transfer (5 minutes often being workable if the trains are generally reliable, and you're able to catch a later train if you miss the intended one).
- ben-schaaf 4y ago
  Swizerland (SBB) has some nice data on this with 98.9% connection punctuality, 40% of connections <5min and 77% under 10min. Though they might be an outlier here given the integrated timetable.
  - microtherion 4y ago
    Indeed the 20 minute interchange assumption interacts quite badly with Swiss schedules, because actual Swiss interchanges are routinely much tighter than that, so each is penalized with 30 or 60 minutes extra for the next connection.
- majewsky 4y ago
  It depends on the station. If you're in Leipzig Central and you need to switch from platform 20 to platform 6, 5 minutes is very stressful because of the sheer number of platforms you need to walk past.
- kitkat_new 4y ago
  doesn't this assume that trains constantly leave the station? In reality there is a train e.g. every hour or so, or even none at the same day
  - nicoburns 4y ago

yreg 4y ago

I think this should be rendered in 3D on a globe so it's easy to compare the covered distances between different places.

jobigoud 4y ago
If you use right-mouse-button it goes into perspective view but the Earth is flat...

goodpoint 4y ago

Sometimes city walkability is expressed more simply: each spot gets a color based on the size of the area that you can reach in a fixed amount of time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map So you don't have to manually explore the map.

stratom 4y ago

It also shows how much the train networks focus on domestic travel. In nearly all bigger countries it is possible to reach most bigger cities within the 5h. But journeys in this time-frame seldomly go much beyond the border. There is still much optimization potential for transnational travel in Europe's train network.

black_puppydog 4y ago
It also shows an effect that the focus on high speed rail brings: rural areas are often very badly connected. Here in France they've even kept shutting down regional lines. That creates the train equivalent of "fly-over states": areas that you see from the train while going through, but that it would be impractical to go to.
- redtexture 4y ago
  This is the strong argument against high speed rail in the USA. We don't even have anything close to regional rail, and highspeed rail would consume all public capital that would be used to improve regional rail systems.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Existing freight rails are so bad that passenger rail should get its own pairs of tracks in many cases (both to be higher speed and to serve the places people actually live, work and shop), and if you’re going to the expense of building new you may as well build it to support higher speeds.
  - awiesenhofer 4y ago
    > public capital that would be used to improve regional rail systems could be used, but we all know thats not how it works ...
    - redtexture 4y ago
      Commuter rail expansion and operations is the primary capital consumption area now, and there are more than a few such local / regional rail systems that could use several billion dollars each, on a continuing basis, for equipment, roadbed and station expansion.

ceejayoz 4y ago

"Not very far right now" seems to be the answer in Ukraine.

deleted 4y ago

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baby 4y ago

Being in the east of France, it's a bit sad how misconnected we are with the west of France. (Lyon <-> Bordeaux you'd think can be done in 2 hours, but no it'll take like 6 hours).

jobigoud 4y ago
It's crazy, I can reach Strasbourg or Bruxelles from Bordeaux, but not Clermont-Ferrand…
deleted 4y ago
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Fiahil 4y ago
Yes, that's because everything here is centered on Paris
jeffbee 4y ago
I wish we had this attitude in California! Bordeaux is a city of roughly the same population and economic activity as Fresno, but there are many in California who still argue that Fresno should not be connected by high-speed rail to any place. California's cities are all arranged in a line, it should be the easiest high-speed rail project ever, but it languishes due to lack of imagination.
- humanistbot 4y ago
  We're of completely opposite minds on this. A stop in Fresno should have been sacrificed so that California High Speed Rail could still happen for the majority of the state. Routing through the Central Valley was practically required for political reasons, and now the entire project has collapsed into a parody of itself. California's cities are not all arranged in a single line. They are in two roughly parallel lines, separated by up to hundreds of miles and across mountains. There are the coastal cities of SF, SJ, SLO, LA, and SD (follows highway 1) and the Central Valley line of Sacramento, Stockton, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, Lancaster/Palmdale (follows highway 99 mostly). The 5 is a compromise interstate that runs in between these two, and there is very little development there. If you've ever driven the 5, you know what I'm talking about. Even most towns "on" the 5 are a few miles away. The HSR line could have been drawn from LA to SF more or less following the 5, stopping at the outskirts of Bakersfield and then zooming straight through to a fork that stops next in either Gilroy (en route to the Bay Area) or Modesto (en route to Stockton and Sacramento). This would have been cheaper, shorter, and less encumbered by the need to get permits, approvals, easements, and the like from everyone in the Central Valley. Meanwhile, the chosen HSR route through the Central Valley runs through dozens of different counties, cities, tax districts, and regional planning agencies. Also, Fresno is far less dense than Bordeaux, and has a population that generally considers a mile to be a "long walk."

WaitWaitWha 4y ago

I delight in isochrone maps[0]! There used to be some open source, web interfaces but they all became commercial. An isochrone map is one of the best tools for weekend get-aways, job hunting, and finding a home location. OpenStreetMap[1]! Add it to your site, it will be great hit, in my opinion. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org https://www.openstreetmap.org

cridenour 4y ago
I ran a home search startup in 2015 and I will always remember the moment my searching finally came up with the name "isochrone" and the explosion of research and data that came with that. Our home search went from "we'll send you an email when its done" to adding fake loading bars to make it seem like it was doing more.
- mwint 4y ago
  By 2015 Zillow was already well entrenched, what was your differentiator?
  - etskinner 4y ago
    Zillow doesn't have isochrones, for one. I long for a map experience that's more like a SQL query than a catalog, and Zillow's filtering leaves a lot to be desired.
    - matthewfcarlson 4y ago
      I agree, Zillow has lackluster filtering. I’ve been working on something similar for people looking for remote work and aren’t particular about where they live. How did the project end up? What were the good parts and the bad parts?
jmkb 4y ago
GeoApify[0] is one of these commercial services using OpenStreetMap data. They have a no-friction isochrone "playground"[1] that's sufficient for casual exploration. You can switch the travel mode to "transit" to include train routes, but the maximum travel time for the demo is capped at one hour. The results are very different, eg chronotrains-eu.vercel.app claims that Wittenberge is within an hour of Berlin Hauptbahnhof, but GeoApify won't take you further than Nauen. Possibly chronotrains-eu is showing a best-case travel time while GeoApify is attempting to calculate realtime travel using the current day's schedules? I doubt the main OSM site would ever host an isochrone demo, as it's more of a reference implementation of very basic map and routing features that OSM data enables. Notably, the routing demos there do not (yet) include any kind of transit mode. [0] https://www.geoapify.com https://www.geoapify.com [1] https://apidocs.geoapify.com/playground/isoline https://apidocs.geoapify.com/playground/isoline

caradine 4y ago

I'd love to see this for the U.S. as well, if only to highlight the contrast

maeln 4y ago

You can really see the Paris-centric approach in France: From Paris you can reach almost any other major city in 4h, but on the other hand, all the other metropolis can barely reach 1/4th of the other major population center in 4h. Compare this to Germany where almost any major metropolis can reach 80% of the country in 4h ...

OJFord 4y ago
Infamously similar in the UK, even despite being smaller. Particularly East-West travel anywhere much North of London. Many inter-city routes are via London. (I'm not complaining, j'habite à Londres ;))
- xenocratus 4y ago
  > anywhere much North of London You don't need to go that much North - I used to live in Oxfordshire, trying to get to Cambridge for work was a joke (I don't drive). It would take 3.5h+ for a 140km journey from Oxford to Cambridge because train journeys were only through London (+ a railway station change), and there was only one coach that stopped in every town along the way (and which has been axed into two separate legs since the pandemic, making it 4h+ now). In the end I moved to London, so that's manageable now...
  - OJFord 4y ago
    I didn't mean much North! Heh, another of those BrE words like 'quite'. Oxford/Cambridge is a classic example, yes. (For those unfamiliar, they're like two spokes right next to each other on quite a small rim where London is the hub. But large enough (or close enough spokes) that 'in and back out' seems silly.)
    - ErikCorry 4y ago
      This is actually being fixed. Someone put huge telescopes on part of the old line, but they are building a new one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_West_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_West_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullard_Radio_Astronomy_Observatory#/media/File:Cmglee_Cambridge_MRAO_Half_Mile_Telescope.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullard_Radio_Astronomy_Observ...

marcosscriven 4y ago

I'd love to see the Eurostar on there. A colleague was stunned I could get from London to Brussels in two hours.

joosters 4y ago
It is on there - highlight Brussels and it’ll show that you can reach Newcastle within five hours. That’s only possible if you go via Eurostar.

NeoTar 4y ago

Sadly, the trains on the Isle of Wight (off the South Coast of England, south of Southampton and Portsmouth) is not included. I'd be interested in their perspective since you can buy a 'train' ticket which includes a ferry crossing, so the isochrone would either extend up to London and beyond (if you allow the ferry), or be restricted to just the island itself (if you do not).

qalmakka 4y ago

As a European it boggles my mind seeing how trains are basically non-existent in the USA (just look at Houston station), given how dominant the whole "Wild West" railroad rush is in everybody's immagination. Railroads are super ubiquitous here, and we've to work with a pretty hostile terrain - Italy has lots of mountains, hills, rivers, and yet has one of the best networks in the world. Most of the USA are basically empty, it would be pretty easy to build high-speed rail.

Robotbeat 4y ago
The fact the US is basically empty means the cost to build a HSR route to go between population centers is super high because of the sheer distances involved. You’re talking like 1000 miles, not 200. The places which are closer together, like the East Coast, do have some passenger rail but they’re also much denser, like Europe, and so they have the same kind of constraints (or worse). The US has a lot of freight rail, and we use it. The Wild West mentality has gone away in the railroad industry which is now hyper-conservative and regulated. I do sometimes wish the US lived up to the Wild West stereotype the Europeans imagine. But no, we often have just as much stifling regulation (if not more), depending on where you’re talking about. But we do have gun violence, so there’s that.
- OJFord 4y ago
  I don't know why this is down-voted so, but to me also outside the US it seems correct? You bill for travel between stations, there'd be a lot more track & travel between stations in the US, on average, if it were as ubiquitous. Intranational flight is a lot more common there. I imagine the economics of it are better, lower ticket price, and in many cases probably quicker too, even including airport BS.
  - ejb999 4y ago
    >>Intranational flight is a lot more common there. I imagine the economics of it are better, lower ticket price, and in many cases probably quicker too, even including airport BS. That is the problem in my opinion - I prefer sitting on a train, to sitting on a plane, but for most routes I need to travel (within the US) it takes longer to get there and is more expensive than flying - why would anyone want to pay more and waste more time? You either need to be faster or cheaper if you want my business.

phreeza 4y ago

So which starting point covers the largest number of people you can reach? I am guessing Brussels since it covers a good portion of the Blue Banana, plus Paris and other big French cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana

nowahe 4y ago
(Semi)surprisingly, Strasbourg looks like a good contender as well, as it covers a good portion of the blue banana, most of Germany, and about half of France

d--b 4y ago

This is great, but it would be better if the selection of the station was a textbox or a smaller map. Right now you have to zoom in to select a station, and then carefully zoom out to see the reach.

emaginniss 4y ago
Or if you could click to "lock on" to a station and then zoom out

ramboldio 4y ago

It's sad to see how disconnected the national railway systems are in eastern europe. Basically, 5h always fills the national borders but no further in Hungary, Romania, Poland etc E.g., train connections from Czech Republic to southern Germany are missing all together.

nisa 4y ago
> train connections from Czech Republic to southern Germany are missing all together. This is a huge problem IMHO. You always have to use the route via Dresden/Prague - it was different in the past - Would be really great if there would be some Eurocity Nürnberg-Pilsen or Munich-Budweis.
klohto 4y ago
We all have neglected the networks while claiming to have “the biggest rail network”. Well, now it’s the slowest, and probably the most underfunded. The missing connection to South Germany don’t make sense though. Just take a train to Berlin and take DB anywhere.
- nisa 4y ago
  > The missing connection to South Germany don’t make sense though. Just take a train to Berlin and take OBB anywhere. It's the difference between 6-8h and 2-3h to reach a city in Czech Republic. However the tracks connecting Germany/Czech Republic in the south are not in good shape if I remember that correctly.
  - klohto 4y ago
    Sure, but the problem is on the Czech part. Once you're in Germany, it's pretty fast.
yorwba 4y ago
The Czech borders are fairly mountainous. If you start in Prague, there's a tentacle that just barely reaches Regensburg in Germany. It crosses the border in the gap between two mountain ranges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cham-Furth_Depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cham-Furth_Depression Building other routes would likely be possible, but only with a lot of tunneling. The Czech-Polish border is similar, I think.

88840-8855 4y ago

I would love to see the same map for China. They have a fantastic HSR network and great trains.

woodruffw 4y ago

For the Europeans on HN: on the East coast of the US, the furthest you can get by train in ~5h is roughly Boston to NYC, or NYC to Washington, DC. Both are roughly equidistant (~220 miles, ~354 kilometers). One of the perverse things with our passenger rail network is that you can actually take take trains that "only" take 2.5 hours, but: they run nonstop point-to-point, and any subsequent connection you make (e.g. to Richmond, a major city in Virginia) will be on a diesel train that shares trackage with CSX or another major freight line. The end result is that traveling the extra ~90 miles from Washington, DC to Richmond generally takes over 3 hours, when it should really take less than an hour.

fatnoah 4y ago
Boston to Philadelphia a closer approximation. The Acela is scheduled for 5h 1m for that trip. I travel between Boston and New York by train frequently, and even the slower regional service takes < 4 hours. Either way, still not a great comparison to Europe.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Sorry, this was confusing wording on my part -- I was trying to say that Boston/NY or NY/DC is consistently under 5 hours, and that just about everything else is over 5 hours, illustrating a gap in our network. NYC to DC is also consistently around 3.5 hours, even with the slower NE Regional.
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    Ah, gotcha!
jonas21 4y ago
~50 million people live along the Boston to DC corridor. That's roughly the population of Spain, and not much less than that of France.
DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
With a modern high-speed rail line, you'd theoretically be able to get from NYC to Chicago in around 4:15, even when accounting for stops along the way. That's an average of 300 km/h. There are already lines in service elsewhere the world that are that fast.

danwee 4y ago

When people talk about how bad trains are in Germany and how good (relatively speaking) they are in Spain, well, one word: connectivity. Hover over any city in Germany and you'll see almost no gaps in the map. Hover over any northern city in Spain and you'll see no direct connection by train among them (!).

jbj 4y ago

Amazing map. Hovering around over South Sweden and North Germany, makes it quite obvious that the Femern tunnel will make a difference in connecting that area. Same for connecting north from Lombardy through the mountains.

kzrdude 4y ago
Sweden-Denmark is already well connected too, but I hope that norway-swesen gets improved.
- housingisaright 4y ago
  Sweden-Norway is getting improved, the railroad between åre-trondheim has been 2 separate trains due to the Norwegian train not being electrified. Which is now being worked on. Trains in the northern parts of Sweden will always be sparse due to the low population tho.

arnaudsm 4y ago

I'm impressed by the low latency, great job sir

gregsadetsky 4y ago
Indeed, it's very well done. Each isochrone is loaded from a static server/CDN -- for example https://chronotrains-eu.vercel.app/api/isochrones/7100002 https://chronotrains-eu.vercel.app/api/isochrones/7100002 -- and that bit of vector map data is then rendered using the mapbox gl/js frontend. Great work
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  Unfortunately it's been hugged to death. I wonder if it loads the entire set of isochrones when you open the page, given how incredibly responsive it is. I tried to share it with someone who would really enjoy it, but alas, no luck at all.
  - gregsadetsky 4y ago
    Aye, it is indeed down, that's sad. The isochrones are loaded over the network on mouse hover. I thought that scheme would keep working and remain fast since the loaded vector data is completely static. I guess the /api/isochrones/<id> url does point to some server-side code which couldn't keep up, unfortunately. Actually, Vercel is returning "This Serverless Function was rate limited." and a 429 code i.e. too many requests. So it's more of a "hitting the limits of the Vercel plan" problem than anything.

omega3 4y ago

This map is slightly misleading as the areas covered by the train stations are huge.

aj7 4y ago

Explains the explosive growth of European regional and budget airlines. Especially with excellent public transportation to airports.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

Nicely done!

thedudeabides5 4y ago

The next time we need to print $1Tr we should build a high speed rail from SF to NYC, via Detriot. #NeoIntercontinentalRailroad

rootusrootus 4y ago
You probably couldn't build HSR from SF to Detroit to NYC for a trillion bucks. But it would be an interesting project nonetheless. With strategic stopping points, I wonder how the population dynamics for the flyover states would change.

dimitrios1 4y ago

You can go from Edinburgh to London in 5 hours or less, that's pretty damn cool.

informalo 4y ago

Same thing for public transport in metro areas (great if you’re looking for a new place to live): https://www.mapnificent.net/ https://www.mapnificent.net/

lkjaero 4y ago
Sadly this site doesn't seem to be maintained still, there's lots of contributions that aren't getting merged. https://github.com/mapnificent/mapnificent_cities https://github.com/mapnificent/mapnificent_cities

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gield 4y ago

From Brussels, Belgium, you can reach in 5h: - Wales and deep into northern England (Newcastle - the whole western border of Germany - the south coast of France - Switzerland I was never into the whole "center of Europe" thing, but this puts things in a different perspective.

Jamie9912 4y ago

Is the website not working for anyone else? It says hover over a city to see the isochrones from that city. But when I do so nothing happens at all?

fguerraz 4y ago
Same here
vultour 4y ago
Looks like the API returns either 429 Too Many Requests or a 500 error, so it's probably hugged to death.
dareiff 4y ago
Too much traffic — all endpoints once on the page are erroring out.
em3rgent0rdr 4y ago
not working for me. Neither linux desktop chrome nor firefox nor android chrome.

phantomathkg 4y ago

Hug of Hacker News. Now all the API returns 429 error.

pahn 4y ago

I made an interactive art installation on this question once: A black box with a knob where you could adjust how much time you have, then it would offer you (Google streetview) panoramas of the locations it found within your distance, and in the end even print a paper slip with your travel itinerary to take with you. The installation used realtime data (Google directions API): I somehow figured out, that if I would run this from a local machine and reset the browser frequently, Google would let me do this even without an API key… they certainly sensed something was awry and I did get API warnings and captchas because of 'suspicious traffic on my network', but they were nice enough not to block me completely. I strongly doubt this would still work though, this was in 2017. Pictures and videos of the installation: https://maschinenzeitmaschine.de/derweil/ https://maschinenzeitmaschine.de/derweil/

patrick91 4y ago
that's a pretty cool project!
ohg 4y ago
Awesome
mustacheemperor 4y ago
I have been wishing Apple or Google maps would add this as a feature for at least five years now. When I’m in a new city for work, and I know I have 90 minutes til my next meeting, it would be massively helpful to see every lunch place in a 15-25 minute walking radius. The fact that there’s still not a “search/filter by transit time” feature in any Maps app seems like proof there’s not enough competition in that space in 2022.
- deleted 4y ago
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- jgust 4y ago
  I think what Maps really needs is more widgets that reduce the screen real estate of the map until we can finally drop that feature entirely.

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wgnmstr12 4y ago

There is a lot of what-if here, but the reality is that most people in the USA prefer the flexibility and speed of (1) Driving wherever and whenever and carrying all your stuff with you, and then (2) flying to your destination for speed. You can cross the east coast in 3 hours or the go to the west cost in 6 on a convenient red-eye. Taking the train is more a novelty, and unclear who would actually use it regularly because it takes much longer (10 hours east cost, 20 hours coast to coast), transport on either endpoint requires you to park or taxi, and you lose all flexibility. We like the idea of the train more than the reality of the train. I've lived in various places around the world where you had to take mass transit always, and all it does is add one to two hours to your commute when I would have much preferred to drive.

madeofpalk 4y ago
You can still drive in Europe. Cars and roads still exist.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Not only that, cars are still more popular than trains. Wouldn't believe it from comments on HN, of course.

fstrazzante 4y ago

awesome project! I like it!

ElemenoPicuares 4y ago

Interface seems to be broken on mobile iOS.

tomduncalf 4y ago
You just need to close the instruction dialog which is obscuring the whole view
- ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
  No — the actual controls on the map don’t work for me. If it works for you then it must be something weird on my device.

andbberger 4y ago

does switzerland dirty

sorenbs 4y ago

We really need Japan on this map :-)

barbazoo 4y ago

Beautiful visualization.

onionisafruit 4y ago

This is very timely. In September I will have four days of down time with my wife in Paris. We want to get out of town but don't know where. This gives us some options. If anybody here has suggestions where we can spend a few days taking in non-Parisian France, let me know.

panick21_ 4y ago
You can hope over and check out Geneva in Switzerland, very nice place.
humanistbot 4y ago
I really liked Strasbourg. France meets Germany in a compact historical center, 2hrs each way from Paris on the TGV. Just go when the EU government is not meeting there, because for 4 days a month, they all have to pack up from Brussels and move to Strasbourg. Reims and the Champagne region are on the TGV to Strasbourg as well, making that an easy day trip from Paris. There are also the night trains (Intercities de Nuit), which go from Paris to some destinations at the periphery of France that are way too long for a normal day trip. It is usually 4 or 6 bunks in a room, but you can pay extra to book the entire room for the two of you. Go to sleep in Paris and wake up 12 hours later in Nice on the Med coast, Briancon (ski resort town in the Alps, great in Summer too), or any of the medieval towns in the Pyrenees near Spain (Carcassonne, Narbonne, Perpignan)
- onionisafruit 4y ago
  Thanks for the Strasbourg tip. That's one of the places I was looking at based on the map. The German cultural influence drew me in. Thanks to your comment I checked the EU schedule and found they will be in Strasbourg at the same time. I like the idea of a night train, but there is a significant chance either my wife or I won't be able to sleep. That would make the next day unpleasant, so we'll save the night train for some time when we have a few more days to spare. Now we are thinking Dijon.
- nixass 4y ago
  Strasbourg will be a connector for Paris to Vienna line. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Line_for_Europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Line_for_Europe It will take 4hrs from Paris to Munich (900km)

gwbas1c 4y ago

FYI: I had to disable uBlock in order for the site to work.

gwbas1c 4y ago

I find the boarder between France and Span fascinating. It looks very hard to cross that boarder by train.

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Yizahi 4y ago

Ukraine data is incorrect, before latest invasion we had multiple semi-fast trains reaching 120-140 km/h between regional centers. Though if it is snapshot of current state of affairs then it can be like that, a lot of trains were canceled or slowed due to war.

kurthr 4y ago

You can also go Beijing to Shanghai in 4.5 hours. That's over 1200km or 750mi averaging above 260km/hr. I think it's the fastest long distance passenger service available and has the benefit of being central Shanghai to south-central Beijing (rather than north-east where PEK airport is). That made it noticeably better than business air travel between the two cities. You could also ride the Pudong maglev (at 430km/hr peak and 250km/hr average), but it was never extended from PVG to Jing An and the main Shanghai station. However, now you have to go through security at each end which adds at least 1.5hr, and that's ignoring pandemic restrictions.

kurthr 4y ago
Then there's Tokyo-Shinagawa to Fukuoko-Hakata which is 1100km and 4.75hr averaging 230km/hr, which is quite fast and easy to take with minimal waits.
- rjh29 4y ago
  Will be even faster once they get maglev.
DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
The Beijing-Shanghai line now averages 292 km/h (that's including stops - the train's top speed is 350 km/h). Maybe even more impressive, the trains cover the first 1018 km, from Beijing to Nanjing, at an average speed of 316 km/h.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
Beijing to Hongkong is about 2,450km and takes 9h by high speed train, which is more than 270km/h average as there are a few stops along the way. I believe that the advertised speed is about 350km/h.
qwezxcrty 4y ago
Hmm, I don't think one needs 1.5hr to pass the pre-COVID China Railway security check. 5 min is the norm I experienced. Honestly, I doubt such security checks can deter determined terrorists.

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webnrrd2k 4y ago

3,353 × 10^9 miles, or 5 light-hours, is the absulute theoretical max. So, in practice, something less than that?

KronisLV 4y ago

> This map shows you how far you can travel from each station in Europe in less than 5 hours. Aww, seems like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia aren't a part of Europe, then. But jokes aside, the visualization itself is pretty cool, though it might also be really useful to be able to put emphasis on the actual train tracks, especially in the further zoom levels, though map implementations don't always allow this to be done easily, without too much customization or running your own tile server.

2dvisio 4y ago

Basically, just click anywhere on the south of Italy to understand how infrastructure investment can be done poorly.

notsapiensatall 4y ago

It would be interesting to see this for the US. You might be able to get from New York City to Boston within 5 hours. If you're leaving from Fargo, though, it would be hard to make it into neighboring Montana. Our best case for taking a coast-to-coast train is 72 hours, but I've never seen a long Amtrak train arrive on time.

bisRepetita 4y ago

Little usability nitpick: it is really hard for me to see the connection Paris - London (less than 2.5 hours in real life thx to Eurostar). You need to very precisely mouse over Gare du Nord, which is hard, since it seems hidden by the other train station and airport nearby. Not sure if at a certain scale, one should see all the conenctions form all the train stations in Paris?

jobigoud 4y ago
Taking into account metro and RER rides should fix this issue I think.

aidenn0 4y ago

I've had an Amtrak train delayed by more than 5h on the West Coast, so here at least the answer is potentially 0. I grew up in the NE USA where Amtrak is usable, if not up to European standards, so trains here are particularly disappointing.

huggin 4y ago

From Beijing to Shanghai, more than 1000 kilometers

alexott 4y ago

I can’t say that’s accurate. For my area it shows that Kassel is 3 hours away, although direct train goes in less than an hour, and even with intermediate stop, it’s slightly more than an hour. South of Germany isn’t connected at all, although I can get to Ingolstadt in less that 5 hours…

have_faith 4y ago
Similarly it told me Sheffield to London (kings cross) is 4 hours when it's a little over 2 hours normally. edit: I think I read it wrong wrong, it put a small darker ring around kings cross and I got 3hr and 4hr colours mixed up (:

szundi 4y ago

Useful after robbing a bank

Balgair 4y ago

It's funny that Ireland isn't on here considering it's the largest English speaking country in the EU now!

bergenty 4y ago

I don’t like trains though, it takes so long especially in a large country like the US. Great for recreation purposes or travel within places closer than 3 hours by car but not otherwise.

steren 4y ago

Nice. It doesn't seem to play very nice with cities that have multiple stations. If you hover Paris, Gare de Lyon gets selected most of the time. But if you zoom in, you can select other Paris stations (e.g. Gare de L'Est) which leads to different results

jobigoud 4y ago
And the station at CDG airport is quite hard to pick, but has much more penetration into the UK than Gare de Lyon.

micheljansen 4y ago

Very well done! I played around with this sort of stuff many years for a property search engine startup. I tried to make a “max commute distance” filter. It was much harder than I thought at the time!

thejackgoode 4y ago

Five hours, I assume, is the maximum amount of time an average person can enjoy sitting in a train. With overnight trains making a comeback, there are much more possibilities. I recently enjoyed falling asleep in Central Europe and waking up over the Alps near the sea. Trains are amazing.

chrisseaton 4y ago
It’s more comfortable to be on a train than a flight and people are happy taking ten hour plus flights no problem.
- Aachen 4y ago
  To be fair, you also get about three to four times the distance per minute out of it (850km/h pretty much the whole way as the crow flies vs 250 average if you're lucky plus curves). To be clear, I find it absurd that airplane companies are still allowed to sell tickets without pricing in externalities for trips with good and high-speed train connections like Paris–Madrid. However, for actually going somewhere far away there just isn't really another choice but to take that plane. Your only other choice is to never go there at all, or take out weeks of travel for a ship or something. It's still too cheap, at least those that go regularly can also afford for Climeworks to undo their environmental pollution, so I hate to be defending air travel here, but 10h flights are a different ball game than 10h train rides.
  - dieortin 4y ago
    The Paris-Madrid connection is not really good though, as you have to go all the way to the east of Spain and pass through Barcelona before heading west towards Madrid. Luckily, there are some lines under construction that will connect Spain to France through Irún, and which should make things much better.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Only because there are no viable alternatives to a 10 hour flight. But the alternative to a 10 hour train ride is a 1-2 hour flight.

jobigoud 4y ago

So what's the longest distance between two such connected stations?

maximilianroos 4y ago

Which city can you reach the most area in 5 hours? Top contenders: - Paris, Gare de Lyon (doesn't seem to include going to Gare du Nord and going to London in this?) - Brussels — can go as far as Newcastle or Avignon - Random ones in the center of Germany which cover all of Germany

maximilianroos 4y ago
If you zoom in to select London Kings Cross, I think that wins

jobigoud 4y ago

I just realized it's not symmetric. If you click Paris it highlights Perpignan (in the South), but if you click Perpignan it doesn't reach Paris at all. Same for Brussels and Newcastle.

foota 4y ago
Maybe express trains only go one way?

brunoluiz 4y ago

That is a very nice app and, funnily enough, I was doing this manually (via Trainline) yesterday after watching this Wendover Production video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9jirFqex6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9jirFqex6g. One suggestion for the app: allow us to pin a city when clicking on the desktop version ;)

germinalphrase 4y ago

On Amtrak? Based on my last attempt - that would be zero meters.

11thEarlOfMar 4y ago

I'd expect Japan to have the highest % coverage (though less square km than France). And the US to just be... humiliating...

presentation 4y ago

The borders really seem to hamper EU train travel, huh.

ittan 4y ago

I would recommend an edit to the title to include Europe.

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timwaagh 4y ago

So it works now and I am sort of disappointed. I can get to Paris and London, which, don't get me wrong, is nice. But Paris is I think three hours and apparently I can't get to anywhere South of there in five.