a lot of the stuff is fundamentally really simple:

- less petrol is leaving the gulf so we need to use less. fiddling with taxes cannot change that

- or, high speed trains are full. reducing prices will not change that

there's complicated economics too but you don't need that to explain things

congrats!

🎉 BIG NEWS: We just closed our first funding round!

Led by #IBBVentures, alongside Tommaso Luca and industry expert like Dr. Patrick Andrade (CEO of HomeToGo) all backing overnight rail as a real alternative to short-haul flight ✈️

Now, let’s put a train on the tracks 🚆

Toilets are killing and injuring more people than ever, and we just ignore it. We have an aging population and deadly designs. We should fix this before more people die.

Thanks Tim. @lloydalter.bsky.social wrote about this recently too - he's also pro Japanese toilets but favours grab-bars over height open.substack.com/pub/lloydalt...

FWIW you can eliminate Flix by unticking "interregio- and fast trains". Until you need an Interregio...

I don't really understand why they can't just show both options

Almost half of EU’s busiest flight routes are ‘hard or impossible’ to book on trains – report ‘Stone age’ system of booking cross-border rail tickets holding back climate action by consumers, says thinktank

Guardian today about my topic - railway ticketing www.theguardian.com/environment/...

It's largely a copy-paste of this press release from @transportenvironment.org www.transportenvironment.org/articles/fla...

The report is solid on the WHY, less good on the HOW to fix these problems

🧵 (1/11)

I do wonder whether our focus on passenger rights rather than forcing the monopolies to sell all tickets is because we already know how to buy tickets

I think I would appreciate research about _why_ passengers only look at incumbents. Maybe they think they'll get more rights?

Now more than ever it's good to subscribe to Jon's newsletter on cross-border rail travel in the EU. jonworth.eu/launch-of-th...

A 3D-printed map that combines Émile Cheysson's fonts, patterns and coastal hatching with muted colours to display a modern dataset: the number of times the French kiss each other on the cheek when greeting in different parts of the country. The colour or pattern on the surface of each department shows the number of kisses employed by a plurality of its residents—from one to four—and the height reflects the percentage of that plurality. This one is made in blushing pink. Data from http://combiendebises.free.fr/

A 3D-printed map that combines Émile Cheysson's fonts, patterns and coastal hatching with muted colours to display a modern dataset: the number of times the French kiss each other on the cheek when greeting in different parts of the country. The colour or pattern on the surface of each department shows the number of kisses employed by a plurality of its residents—from one to four—and the height reflects the percentage of that plurality. This one is made in a kind of teal. Data from http://combiendebises.free.fr/

A 3D-printed map that combines Émile Cheysson's fonts, patterns and coastal hatching with muted colours to display a modern dataset: the number of times the French kiss each other on the cheek when greeting in different parts of the country. The colour or pattern on the surface of each department shows the number of kisses employed by a plurality of its residents—from one to four—and the height reflects the percentage of that plurality. This one is made in off-white. Data from http://combiendebises.free.fr/

A 3D-printed map that combines Émile Cheysson's fonts, patterns and coastal hatching with muted colours to display a modern dataset: the number of times the French kiss each other on the cheek when greeting in different parts of the country. The colour or pattern on the surface of each department shows the number of kisses employed by a plurality of its residents—from one to four—and the height reflects the percentage of that plurality. This one is made in a far too vivid yellow. Data from http://combiendebises.free.fr/

I 3D-printed a Cheysson-style map of France showing the modal number of salutatory cheek-kisses in each department. It took ages.
3dartmaps.etsy.com/listing/4490...

i don't think he really built that dam. he's just trying to fool the tourists

A ticket with ‘5 Geschlechtskrankheiten’

Not sure how this train booking platform works, or how this happened -

AI translated ‘STD’ meaning ‘Stunden’ (hours) into English as ‘Sexually Transmitted Disease’.

So it appeared as ‘Geschlechtskrankheiten’ on ticket.

www.krone.at/4109338

it doesn't need it. it just has to set tolls really high to starve them. which is what it does (although recently it has finally worked out that it should move to a model with higher fixed costs and lower variable costs)

a map of Charlotte coloured by population density

ooh i have a pet site for this too if you want to play o.blanthorn.com/population-around-a-tile/

mostly aimed at cities but you can crank the resolution up if you want to compare countries. tap to start getting graphs

you can't currently link to comparisons but with some work i could add it...

The Densest Country in Europe (isn’t what you think) YouTube video by Oh The Urbanity!

The Densest Country in Europe (isn’t what you think)

i actually have some sympathy here since they funded the line. but the SNCF could come to some other agreement where they get a more frequent TER from e.g. reductions in tolls or something

Thinking about the 2021 BNSF train-barge collision where the post-accident interviewer was asking the train crew if they can steer the train

yes, right, I was using census data. covid was plausibly pretty effective at emptying out city centres.

honestly reprojecting UK statistical geographies is one of my least favourite hobbies but I'll try to get round to updating it and checking 👍

I don't think I can reproduce this. A while ago I projected england and wales census counts onto UPRNs, see the left hand side versus right for Kontur's GHSL dataset. They seem to be in good agreement except for Manchester

Are the ONS small area estimates more covid-proof?

Alphaville: Why the Extremely Paywalled FT’s Shitposting ‘Skunkworks’ is Still Free to Read Robin Wigglesworth, the editor of the snarky, meme-y Financial Times finance blog spoke to AMO about the debate over keeping it outside the FT paywall.

Lovely piece from @bronmaher.bsky.social on Alphaville, "the FT’s Shitposting ‘Skunkworks’", with input from @robinwigglesworth.ft.com, @lionelbarber.bsky.social and a small contribution from yours truly

www.amediaoperator.com/news/financi...

In a rare appearance on Bluesky, I shall repeat my argument against this. It's just a case of over-analysing poor data. Use the correct data, and Britain's big cities are just as dense as Northern European equivalents like Hamburg and Rotterdam that are much more productive and support great metros.

have you talked to GHSL about it? they talk with some pride about improving their estimates so i would hope they'd be happy to engage

(I say this selfishly as a user of the data)

the centre for cities is pushing for density to improve public transport in the UK www.centreforcities.org/blog/british...

i like density but i just don't believe it has much link to quality of public transport. switzerland has some of the least dense yet most productive cities on the planet

great, i see, annex 3 op.europa.eu/en/publicati... rather than annex 6 :)

now i am wondering what the two seasonal trains a week were via Limone/Tende

oh, right. for me personally styling them was the easy bit. the hard bit was getting the data

there are things like www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10... but they include loads of railways that were demolished ~100 years ago

Olivetta-S. Michele 🇮🇹 – Breil-sur-Roya 🇫🇷

This looks amazing :)

On e.g. crossborderrail.eu/borders/oliv...

where are you getting "European Commission Historical Data" with the average speed from?

and what does "Passenger services: 28 / 0 / 0 / 2 (37)" mean?

New Borders Map system launched Throughout my #CrossBorderRail work I have not always been very systematic documenting what I learned. But today I have the first version of a better documentation system ready! Thanks to support from...

Right, my new map and database of all #CrossBorderRail lines in Europe is online!

This blog post explains what I am trying to do:
crossborderrail.eu/new-borders-...

At the moment it is all rather provisional, so bear with me, but the idea is to have EVERY line mapped, and basic data available!

GitHub - hiddewie/OpenRailwayMap-vector: OpenRailwayMap vector tiles OpenRailwayMap vector tiles. Contribute to hiddewie/OpenRailwayMap-vector development by creating an account on GitHub.

if you want to iterate on it quickly i found osmium + tilemaker much faster than planetiler

github.com/bovine3dom/f...

but you're probably best off contributing to openrailwaymap's vector tiles here
github.com/hiddewie/Ope...

openrailwaymap.app

Data, like oil in the ground, has latent value. It becomes economically productive only when something extracts and refines it. For data, that technology is artificial intelligence. AI systems given access to integrated public datasets can identify patterns, improve service delivery, accelerate research, and generate significant commercial returns. In this case AI is the instrument, not the asset, learning from the data it is given to provide actionable insights. The political question is the same one Norway faced: how to best capture the wealth generated from this valuable resource. If public data is made available to private firms in a piecemeal way, at marginal cost, the aggregate value of the integrated whole is lost. If developers build proprietary products on fragments of public datasets, the returns flow to private shareholders, often overseas. This was the mistake Britain made with oil. Public data should not be sold outright but licensed under strict conditions including audited access, in secure environments, with royalties, revenue shares and equity participation flowing back to a national fund. The data remains sovereign. The value accrues to the public.

Group of Labour MPs proposes new policies to beat rightwing populism www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

A pamphlet from the Fabians, we are saved fabians.org.uk/publication/...

Anna Gelderd MP's essay on data is particularly incoherent

but the chart is showing modal share 🤔

Jon Worth question to Matthew Goodwin at MCC Event Budapest 13th April 2026, and Goodwin's answer YouTube video by Jon Worth

So here is the video of the question I asked Goodwin, and his response

The key question - how much he will lose financially if MCC is wound up - is not answered

www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7OP...