Local wanderlust

Alastair Humphreys, using a 20 by 20 kilometer map of where he lives, explored one square kilometer at a time as if he were traveling farther. For the Guardian:

Travelling around my unremarkable map for a year gave me much to remark on. It was one of the most interesting journeys of my life and shifted my perspective on the way we choose to travel. It made me calmer and healthier. It fostered feelings of curiosity, awe, gratitude and a deeper awareness of nature than I had experienced before. The more you look, the more you see. The more you see, the more you learn and care. Your local map is a fractal of the world at large. Embrace it, care for it, cherish it, and discover it. You might just find that a single map is enough exploration for an entire lifetime.

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Find familiar places in new cities

If you’re traveling to a new city, it can be tricky to figure out where things are and what the places are like. However, if you had a tool that set the context of the new city in terms of the neighborhoods in a city you know, you might get a better feel for the new city. Raymond Kennedy made an app (that appears to rely heavily on the OpenAI API) that lets you search the unfamiliar city against the familiar. [via Waxy]

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Mapping how far you can travel by train in five hours, from any European station

This European travel map by Benjamin Td shows how far you can travel in five hours, given a station location. Just hover over the map, and you see the areas, or isochrones that are reachable in five hours, assuming 20 minutes for interchanges.

The project is based on data from Deutsch Bahn, and was inspired by a more dotty map by Julius Tens. It reminds me of Tom Carden’s (now Flash-retired) travel time map from 2008.

I wonder what this would look like for the United States, but I am also a little scared to know.

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Tracking airfare as a proxy for summer travel plans

Quoctrung Bui and Sarah Kliff for NYT’s The Upshot used difference charts to show how current airfare prices are approaching 2019 prices, based on data from travel app Hopper. This seems to indicate that people are getting ready to travel again.

Because airfare is typically purchased weeks or months in advance, it can be a barometer of how the public is feeling about the pace of recovery. The prices in the Hopper data, which includes fares displayed over three years of searches (representing billions of flight queries), now suggest a travel recovery that could be in full effect as early as this summer.

The red shade between each line shows the difference between prices year-over-year. Usually the area color in difference charts reflects the metric that is greater, but in these, the area reflects the metric that is less. That confused me for a second. But I’m curious if you’re not familiar with difference charts, do you just see the pattern correctly right away?

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County stay-at-home orders and change in distance traveled

Based on cellphone data from Cuebiq, The New York Times looked at how different parts of the country reduced their travel between the end of February and the end of March. Some counties really stayed at home. Some not so much:

In areas where public officials have resisted or delayed stay-at-home orders, people changed their habits far less. Though travel distances in those places have fallen drastically, last week they were still typically more than three times those in areas that had imposed lockdown orders, the analysis shows.

The streets are quiet here in northern California, so this is pretty shocking for me. If you can, stay at home, folks. It’s inconvenient, but it’s a small sacrifice for something much bigger.

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Distorting geography to show train travels

Jan Willem Tulp visualized train travel times using distance and color as an indicator. His reasoning:

When a train starts running from one station to the next station, conceptually, these two stations will temporarily be closer to each other. And that is exactly what this visualization shows: whenever a train moves to the next station — and only for as long as a train is moving — the origin station moves towards the destination station.

Be sure to watch the animation run with organic-looking behaviors.

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The personal data you generate when you book a flight

Every time we book a flight, a Passenger Name Record is generated and saved by an outdated system, which links to private travel data. Paz Pena, Leil-Zahra Mortada and Rose Regina Lawrence for the Tactical Technology Collective outline that data and describe the consequences of the system failing to keep data private.

But although the PNR system was originally designed to facilitate the sharing of information rather than the protection of it, in the current digital environment and with the cyber-threats facing our data online, this system needs to be updated to keep up with the existing risks. PNRs are information-rich files are not only of interest for governments; they are also valuable to third parties – whether corporations or adversaries. Potential uses of the data could include anything from marketing research to hacks aimed at obtaining our personal information for financial scams or even doxxing or inflicting harm on activists.

Maybe be more careful next time you post your travel pictures online.

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Find the fastest flight between airports

Fastest flight

Flight arrival and departure times are often thought of in terms of "on time" or "delayed." To determine the "best" airline, we look for the airline with the highest rate of on time flights. That makes sense, until you consider that many airlines pad their schedules with extra minutes.

If your flight is late, it still seems like it's on time and if it's actually on time, it seems like you arrive early.

FiveThirtyEight attempts to take this into account. They also weight delay times, because a 15-minute delay is different from a two-hour delay, and they treat regional carriers differently than the major ones, because regionals tend to be much slower.

And ultimately, it's not so much about delays and on time rates as it is, "Which flight is gonna get me there fastest?" FiveThirtyEight's interactive can help with that.

Just select an origin airport and a destination, and you get a list of airlines with their typical add-on minutes.

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