A developer from Paris uses a graphic to show how far you can travel in Europe within 5 hours by train. The data comes from Deutsche Bahn.
Anyone who has ever wondered how far he or she can get from a certain station in five hours no longer has to check individual connections, but can now look it up online with just one click. A developer from Paris, who calls himself Benjamin Td on Twitter, has built a website on which a so-called isochrone map shows what is possible on the rails. To select train stations, just move the mouse over them.
Isochrones are lines of the same time or the same occurrence of an event. Isochrone maps are therefore also called accessibility maps. Visually, the whole thing resembles a heat map, with red areas being reached within an hour and faint yellow areas within five hours.
Where the data comes from
According to the developer, the data is fed from an older Deutsche Bahn interface and is available for large parts of Europe. However, only connections that will run in the next one to two weeks are recorded. The starting point of the project was a similar website by Julius Tens from Berlin. After entering a station, you can see which direct connections there are from the selected station and how long it takes to reach the stations on the route.
Source code should be published
The five-hour project also takes transfer connections into account, albeit with a relatively generous transfer window of 20 minutes. According to the developer, the project is a next.js app that displays the whole thing on a map using Mapbox-GL-js. Some preprocessing was necessary for the graphs, the developer writes on Twitter. Due to the great response, the server was temporarily overloaded in the first few days. It is planned to publish the source code as open source in the near future.
What the isochrone map shows, among other things, is how small the range by train from some cities is – even if they are in central locations. The website is useful for checking the rail connections of different places – for some, for example, this is a criterion when choosing where to go on holiday or where to live. As expected, those cities that are served by high-speed trains have a long range. In a European comparison, Germany is not in a bad position at all. The bigger problem here is the punctuality of the trains, which also has a negative effect on connecting connections. Further investments in high-speed trains give hope for the future.
