MetaFilter posts tagged with transportation and geography

Pick your plot, worry about the details later.

davidjmcgee — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 17:51:13 -0800

As Americans, we pick a place to live and then figure out how to get where we need to go. If no way exists, we build it. Roads, arterials, highways, Interstates, and so on. Flexible and distributed transportation networks are really the only solution compatible with that way of thinking. Trains, which rely on a strong central network, never had a chance. We were destined for the automobile all the way back in 1787, when we first decided to carve up the countryside into tidy squares.

Town, Section, Range, and the Transportation Psychology of a Nation From Per Square Mile (previously).

You can hear the whistle blow, across the Nile

infini — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 06:07:29 -0800

When it comes to railways, the British are famous for their colonial legacy of one of the world's most extensive railway networks built across then British India but their lesser known and far grander vision was the Cape to Cairo railway network intended to stretch across the sea of colonial pink on the African continent. Left incomplete due to politics and geography, most of it is still almost as it was built in its day. Egypt, historically and internationally, was the second country after the UK to have a working railway, from Alexandra to Cairo built by Robert Stephenson himself. This was the first railway on the African continent, and the first section begun in 1852, was opened to Kafr-el-Zayat in 1854 ; a further section throughout to Cairo was opened two years latter. From Cairo the railway was carried on to Suez, thus completing the overland route by rail. Until the opening of the Suez canal in 1869 it was a source of considerable revenue to the Egyptian State Exchequer. Yet its continued development eventually put the country into debt and the history of the railroad in Egypt is inextricably bound to that of the country's economic development. With more than 5,000 kilometres (3,100 miles) of track, Sudan has one of the longest railways in Africa, extending from Port Sudan on the Red Sea to Nyala in the war-torn west, and from Wadi Halfa on the Egyptian border to Wau in the far south. But it now carries less than six percent of Sudanese traffic, and the last passenger train to depart from north Khartoum station left in 2010, according to a policeman guarding the empty building. Ironically, it was conflict that initially prompted the development of Sudan's railway. The first section of the present-day network was built by the British in the late nineteenth century to support their military operations against Sudanese leader Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi, who had defeated the colonial forces some ten years earlier. It was later expanded, and used profitably to export animals, sugar and cotton primarily from Gezira state, Sudan's agricultural heartland south of Khartoum, between the Blue and White Nile. The best known section in its time (traveled on by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt while on safari) laid tracks through what is now Kenya and Uganda initially as a means to attract British settlers to the colonies of British East Africa as well provide freight transport links from the interior of the Uganda Protectorate out to the coastal city of Mombasa's port and harbour. Established as the Uganda railway and then the East Africa Railway Corporation as sections extended further into the region, it came to be popularly known as the Lunatic Express. The story of why it was built, how and by whom is a fascinating glimpse of history, geography and Hollywood style adventure. South Africa's railway network has given it its own place in history, including the story of Jack the Signalman - a baboon who helped his crippled master retain his railway job. Not only did he get his monthly rations from the government but he also received an employment number. Cape Town was where Cecil Rhodes dreamed of linking the African continent from top to bottom - a lost dream of an era of colonial and military history closely intertwined with massive engineering works and the evolution of modern transportation. Some of it carefully preserved even today as this newly BRICS nation pours investment into high speed transportation linking its capital city and the surrounding economic region.

Mapping with time rather than distance.

OmieWise — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 05:50:45 -0800

Time Maps maps the Netherlands based on how long it takes to reach a given destination rather than how far away it is.
We can reach almost any destination by train easily and relatively quick. In our busy lives we now think in time rather than distance[...]From the perspective of Eindhoven, for instance, the Netherlands is relatively small because of the quick and easy connections to other cities. At the same time, seen from a more remote and small village such as Stavoren the Netherlands is much bigger[...]At night the map will expand because there are no night trains and in the morning it will shrink once trains will commence their schedules. Here is a video demonstration.

The Geotaggers' World Atlas

emilyd22222 — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:08:20 -0800

Photographer Eric Fischer created stunning maps of the places that pictures are taken in fifty cities worldwide. New York. London. Paris. San Francisco. Fischer took geographical data from Flickr and Picasa search APIs. Using perl scripts, the pictures were sorted by photographer and date/time. The scripts generated PostScript which were then converted to JPEGs using Ghostscript. He determined the speed at which the photographers were traveling based on their photos’ timestamps and geotags, and plotted them on an OpenStreetMap background layer. Lines are drawn between every two pictures that are reasonably close together in place and time. The color of the lines represent different modes of transportation: Black is walking (less than 7mph) Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph) Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph) Green is freeways or rapid transit Pictures are ordered by the density of photographs around a city center.

Hell's Gate and Beyond

Miko — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 10:00:40 -0800

Maritime New York