If you live in a big city, you’ve probably been running late, missed the bus or the train, needed to get home safely at least once. So you’ve probably taken a cab.
This interactive graphic from the Washington Post compares cab fares across a number of major cities in the United States. The cheapest cab rides are to be found in Washington D.C. The priciest are in Honolulu.
Credit for the piece goes to Todd Lindeman and Sisi Wei.
Long time readers know by now that I advocate high-speed rail and similar transport infrastructure investment. The following screenshot was taken from a BBC News video about the Russian proposal to build an underground passenger/freight tunnel beneath the Bering Strait to connect eastern Siberia to Alaska.
The video is not an infographic, strictly speaking, but as a motion graphic it depicts the routes needed and compares the length of the proposed tunnel to that of the Chunnel, the tunnel beneath the English Channel. Back in August the Daily Mail also reported on the story and provided the following map showing how exactly the system would then link the Eastern Hemisphere to the Western Hemisphere.
Of course the big questions that remain are can Russia afford to build the tunnel, will the United States build the rails necessary to link it to the main US–Canadian rail network, and would anyone really use it?
The Northeast Passage was supposed to be a shortcut to Asia from Europe through an open waterway in North America. Many tried to find the route. They failed. Because we have a mountain range running from the northernmost part of North America to the Isthmus of Darien where, perhaps desperate for the route, we dug the Panama Canal.
Climate change, however, is shrinking the Arctic ice cap and making the northern shores of Canada, Russia, the US and a few others navigable. True, the best times for travel are in summer. True, there are still icebergs the further from the coast you go. But you can now travel the Northeast Passage, sailing north from Japan, skirting the Russian coast and then down the North Sea into the commercial ports of northern Europe.
The New York Times has a piece about the improving business opportunities for those daring enough to ply the route. Accompanying the article is this map, a cropping of which appears below.
As most of us know, the final space shuttle mission lifted off on Friday. Appropriately, the New York Times created an infographic for the news stories accompanying the mission that details the history of the entire shuttle program’s flights. If you are a space-y kind of guy like me, it’s worth a look.
RMS Titanic launched 100 years ago today in Belfast, where the anniversary was marked all these years later and the BBC covered it. In a related article, the BBC looked at why people celebrate a ship that had such a brief and tragic history, in which there was this small little graphic illustrating the failure of the watertight bulkheads.
Airlines merge. (As do many other companies, but those companies are not the focus of this post.) And often the mergers are complex. Lamentably, one cannot simply merge logos and be done. Here is looking at you, UAL Corporation (United Air Lines) + Continental Airlines Inc.= United Continental Holdings Co.—not that I particularly care for the United Continental logo mashup, I miss the Saul Bass logo for United.
Unfortunately there are things to worry about like getting planes to fly, not crash into each other, not to mention ticketing, unions, general technology…one hopefully gets the idea.
But for those of you who do not, an article in the New York Times about the merger of Delta and Northwest includes a graphic about the master guide to the whole process. Note the use of sticky pad paper. Each piece represents one project, with projects containing as many as a thousand separate tasks.
99 years ago today, the RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic with more than 2/3 of the over 2200 passengers losing their lives. The ship was rather state-of-the-art and was considered remarkably safe with more lifeboats than was legally required for the passengers and crew. She also had a number of watertight bulkheads that could contain flooding and keep the ship afloat even if a remarkable total of four such compartments were flooded.
But as we all know, the iceberg, frigid water, and brittle steel combined to flood not four, but six compartments. And while more than legally sufficient, the number of lifeboats and passenger space was insufficient to save all the passengers. This illustration, by G.F. Morrell details how floating catamaran deck rafts could have saved lives.
All photos from Life.
My co-worker, Ben, who is far more knowledgable about cars than myself, brought the following to my attention.
At the Consumer Electronics Show we always get to see the latest in cool, new, must-have toys. This year, however, a company called Fulton Innovations displayed a proof-of-concept, wireless charging-station for electric vehicles. And while one must wonder about the conservation and inefficiencies of such a powering station, Fulton provided information on just how efficient their system would be. In the form of graphics.
And by and large, they are not bad. Yes, yes, the pie charts could be substituted for something else. But, I do like linking the colours in the pie chart to the parts in the power-system located in the diagram of the car. They help to explain just where exactly the inefficiencies in the system are to be found. And by providing the base of the plugged-in car, they also allow one to compare the two methods of wireless charging to that of plugging the vehicle in.
This is another comparison of high-speed lines and how woefully inadequate American infrastructure is in this particular department. The graphic comes via the Chicago Tribune in support of this article, wherein the outgoing mayor states the need for a high-speed line to link downtown Chicago to O’Hare International Airport. Apparently his desire for such speedy transit was inspired by his trip to Shanghai, where the Chinese have had a magnetically-levitated (maglev) train connecting the airport to the city for a few years. It’s fast. (Though as the article makes a point to call out, the Shanghai train does not stop in downtown Shanghai, but rather the city’s edges where travelers then link up with a more conventional train to reach downtown.)
The chart is nice because it breaks down the types of trains into categories based upon speed, and in the area of interest, namely high-speed, the express section is broken out in detail with the several main types of high-speed trains described. Of course these are all maximum speeds and I would be curious to see a comparison of average operating speeds. For example, while Acela is billed as fast, it frequently operates well below maximum speeds because of its route—the Northeast Corridor was not designed for trains running at such high speeds all those years ago.
At the bottom is a comparison of the overall length of the Blue Line, the Chicago route that connects the Loop (downtown) to O’Hare, to the distance needed to accelerate and decelerate a high-speed train to its maximum speed. Overall, I think the plan sounds like a glossing over of other deficiencies in the Chicago mass transit network for the sake of shiny new toys for (outgoing) mayoral boys.
