some good news - in the centre of London, cyclists are on track to outnumber motor vehicles (cars, buses, lorries) within a couple of years
anecdotally it has got a much more pleasant place to walk around in the last decade
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/22/london-has-become-a-cycling-city (£)
it keeps coming up a lot so here's a table of the median daytime utilisation rates of trains in all the countries i have data for.
previously i was defining it as the "distance from french utilisation rates" but i realised that this was unfair - what if a country is more french than france?
it turns out there are two: Montenegro and Malaysia.
I wonder if anyone has ever asked the SNCF if they are looking at those countries as role models, or if it's just a coincidence?
Looks like the median DB IC/ICE sitting at a station waits for 3 minutes while TGVs wait for 5.
The penalty seems to be a fairly constant two minutes below the 85th percentile which is interesting - I would have expected it to be a constant %.
> On one route, a 54% increase in service on Sunday (a shift to a consistent half-hourly schedule) brought a 177% increase in ridership. On Saturdays, where there was no change in service, ridership rose only 18%, demonstrating that the increased ridership was not primarily by neighborhood change.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-14/the-toronto-suburb-where-the-humble-bus-is-king
I wonder why French local trains are really expensive for passengers whilst being 80% subsidised
There's six hours until the next train so I'll have plenty of time to think
How long does it take the median person to walk to the nearest bakery?
I'm not sure, but I had a go at working it out using the Foursquare OS Places dataset and some old European Commission population grid data, making some pretty daft assumptions along the way (e.g. bakeries and people are evenly distributed, people walk at 5km/h in direct straight lines, people who live more than 15 minutes from a bakery don't exist, bakeries not on Foursquare don't exist...)
I think the map is cool
@apps Fedilab's "search cache" function is absolutely fantastic for finding toots that I know I've seen within the last few days
thank you for all your work on it ♥️
This is so cool: visualise 100 million books by ISBN, totally client side using shaders, runs smooth-ish on a phone
https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2025/visualizing-all-books-in-isbn-space/
can't wait to watch 1,300 people get off a Ouigo and cram into one of these
paraphrased: "people have to wait ages, sometimes half an hour, between their TGV arriving and the shuttle into the town centre, and the last TGV of the day arrives after the shuttle has stopped running"
any idiot like me might be tempted to say, hmm, you need a better timetable. but luckily i am not in charge because really what they need is TINY TRAINS
bit random but I've been happily using my population density map to follow along @jon 's #CrossChannelRail to quickly get an idea of how many people the stations he is mentioning could serve. just click a location to see the population (you may need to scroll down the box at the top)
if you're on data or on iOS you'll definitely want to click "cancel" to the prompt asking about high resolution data
@jon looks like someone has solved all the #CrossChannelRail problems
there's an innovative approach to complex systems for dealing with voltage differences too - just don't have catenaries
https://metro.co.uk/2025/03/19/a-new-tube-europe-link-uk-39-european-countries-via-train-22753362/
So, when blue Eurostar full, decent options are:
- London <-> Bruges FlixBus for ~€30, sociable hours, ~4 hours driving + 1.5h on the ferry
- London <-> Lille FlixBus for ~€70, overnight, if unlucky arriving at Lille at ~3am, ~3 hours driving, 30min Eurotunnel
(Edit: add 0-3 hours for border/traffic for 5-8 hours total)
If the Eurostar isn't full and you're flexible about travel, https://snap.eurostar.com/ is often four times cheaper than standard tickets
Thanks to everyone who helped!
Does anyone know which coach routes between England and mainland Europe minimise the time spent on a coach?
Often at peak times the Eurostar is full, but there are often still places on coaches going on ferries or on the shuttle through the tunnel. You're not allowed as a foot passenger on the shuttle unless you take a bicycle and book quite far in advance.
London -> Lille is my best candidate, but annoyingly prices are twice what it costs for London -> Paris
Apparently the timetable for the Transdev Marseille -> Nice line was released in January
https://storage.googleapis.com/is-wp-22-prod/uploads-prod/2025/02/Fiche-horaire-ZOU-TRSI.pdf
🚀 Trains hourly rather than every two hours, no gap for lunch
🚀 Trains until 9pm every day of the week in summer, two hours later than currently
🚀 2157 service from Marseille on Fridays/Saturdays makes #CrossBorderRail Madrid, even Seville -> Nice doable in a single day
😟 Morning service arrives 0803, misses 0804 to Barcelona
😟 Evening trains in week stop at 7pm mid September+
(via loco_yt_trains and Nicholas Brooke on the bird site)
The tickets seem to be being sold via SNCF Connect already with no mention of obligatory reservation. Presumably it means the trick of using a three department day passes to save an absolute fortune over the Kilometerpreis for a day return or for two people travelling will still work...
cc @jon
My top tips having done this a couple of times a year for three years:
- connection is unreliable? the app is better in aeroplane mode
- delayed by an hour? interrail will give you some money, screenshot your tickets and proof of delay. a ≥ two hour stay in a city counts as a destination. submit once your pass expires via form
- Scotty/SBB/DB fine for planning but check with national site for realtime delays
- check nightride.com for night train availability and b-europe for eurostar
Interrail tickets are on sale again, 15% off until April 1st, buy now and start any time within the next 11 months
I recommend buying from https://allaboard.eu/interrail who will give you a free refund unlike if you buy direct
For adults aged 28-59, the pass I use, "any ten days within two months", is €380
Further advice on @jon 's https://jonworth.eu/interrail-tips-and-tricks/ and encyclopedic https://interrailwiki.eu/
It's my favourite way to travel around Europe by far - the flexibility is unmatched
It is daft that split tickets have to be separate tickets - clearly they could just have one origin and destination with a QR code showing each individual ticket
It's also true that split tickets lead to complicated restrictions, but computers are good at that - there's no reason we could have a "which services can I take" website that comes up when you scan the QR code
I know you try to stay out of UK rail @jon but I think some of the principles of the ticketing system are worth stealing
8. I'll get 50% back on the face value of the physical tickets wired to my bank account in the next few days
9. So rather than £30 the 200km straight line journey will have cost me £15
I think the key points are:
1. Encourage split tickets, don't make them illegal (SNCF!)
2. Free market for ticket sellers
3. Journeys are protected, not individual tickets
4. When stuff goes wrong, everyone has to help, no matter whose "fault" it is
4/
People like to complain about British train tickets because they're complicated, but they do also work in ways that continental Europe could learn from:
1. I went to Trip.com and put in my origin and destination
2. It came back with a huge array of prices, times and routes. I picked the one that suited me best (the cheapest)
3. I went to the station to collect my four physical tickets, far cheaper than one physical ticket - Trip.com found the best combination
1/
4. I did my journey which was three trains from two different companies, and a ferry from a third
5. The final train was 33 minutes late, which meant I was due compensation
6. Because in the UK, journeys are protected, not tickets, the compensation was due on the whole trip and not just the last physical ticket
7. To get compensation, I filled in a form on the final train company's website and sent them photos of the tickets
2/