Yeah, like for another example, I'd stumbled across some (probably somewhat obscure) blog/podcast series about Bob Dylan songs some time ago, but had forgotten to bookmark it. A few month later, I tried to find it again using the same search terms, but nothing turned up anymore (only dozens of various song lyrics pages, but not the blog I was interested in). Luckily I eventually managed to retrieve it from some older backup of my browser history…
> And personally if it's more than 5 min of walking i would just look up the way to the station and then from the station separately with whatever modes i prefer
Problem is when there's multiple stations nearby and which one has the quickest connection varies depending on when exactly you leave. In that case manually checking every combination of stations could be somewhat cumbersome, especially if there's a choice of stations at both ends…
Ok also true. In my google maps in public transport mode there's also an option to prefer least walking or fewest connections, maybe it's not available in some cities?
Well, in my opinion Google Maps is terrible as an actual map anyway, it's more like some vaguely map-shaped thing that serves as a convenient geographical background for displaying POIs and directions on, but no so much use for actually orienting yourself or getting a feel for the geography of a place.
And +1 to the lack of railway lines when zoomed out, indeed another annoyance along the above lines.
> This is what happens when the market for phone batteries only exists for OEMs who buy millions at a time, custom.
Even a few years ago when phones with replaceable batteries weren't that rare and I was in possession of one – by the time I started thinking about a battery replacement, offers of original OEM batteries usually seemed to have vanished into thin air and it was having to find out which aftermarket battery seemed reputable enough…
No indoor smoking makes a major difference, but there still are enough semi-stationary semi-close-up situations where smokers can be still rather annoying, e.g. outdoor seating in cafes and restaurants, popular lunch break spots in parks and plazas, public transport stops, next-door neighbours… And even if you manage to position yourself upwind of all pre-existing smokers, there's no guarantee that a few minutes later somebody upwind of you suddenly won't light up…
Another crucial difference is that energy supply (as in selling energy to end users – physically providing electric energy to the grid on the other hand does require sufficient physical transport capacity in some ways) and internet access are much more virtual things – the mere existence of an additional company offering those services doesn't directly congest the infrastructure as such.
Trains on the other hand are decidedly physical things that take up a significant amount of space on the infrastructure, and they do so as soon you start offering the service, no matter whether people actually use it or not. This means that railway networks can only support a very limited amount of competing companies before you start running out of capacity to run additional trains, and it's especially easy to run out of capacity when you're talking about mixed-traffic railways where fast long-distance services intermingle with slower regional and/or freight services.
And as soon as you run out of capacity, train operating companies have to start battling each other for train paths instead of passengers, a situation that can have completely different incentives which aren't necessarily best aligned with passengers' actual interests.
Another difference is that competing trains obviously cannot run at exactly the same time, which again makes competition less efficient because trains running at differing times cannot be perfect substitutes for each other, which becomes relevant once you add passengers' external schedule-constraints (having to arrive in time for work or whatever appointment they might have and maybe cannot really influence) into the mix. (Long-distance leisure travel is probably less affected by that, because people are regularly willing to flex their schedules for that, but other kinds of traffic aren't as flexible.)
This effect then only gets magnified further once connections come into play, because with different trains along the same route always having to be separated by at least a few minutes, it's impossible to offer equally attractive connections between e.g. a branch line (which might run only hourly or half-hourly at best) and all the various hypothetical competing services on the main line.
Which means you also need to battle the housing problem, too, though, plus changes in settlement patterns take years to decades to manifest. In the meantime, you might have to weather quite some griping about it or even serious pushback.
Generally speaking, not my problem and not something I care all that much about in my city.
I don't think society needs to accommodate that lifestyle so someone can live 30 miles away from work and treat my city like a place you just commute to work to. Those days are increasingly over, as cities realize this is bad for the city and incredibly expensive to operate (surface parking lots are economic extractions and tax revenues low).
You are of course right there is pushback, and things take time to manifest, but we moved to the suburbs at one point there's no reason we can't fix that. I'm not entirely sure why my city council for example cares what suburban voters who don't vote in our elections really think outside of 2nd hand complaining from employers. But they're free to relocate their large downtown offices to the suburbs, we shouldn't cater to them anyway precisely because they can move at any time leaving quite the financial problem as building patterns revolve around this 8-5 white collar commuter scheme to surface parking lots, and if the anchor tenant leaves you're left with, basically, a dead city. It's incredibly fragile and stupid.
> Unused memory is wasted memory. 77% is basically caches + private process memory + shared memory.
In simplified overviews, Windows counts file system caches (standby memory) as free (respectively available) memory, so if 77% of 32 GB is to be taken literally, it still sounds rather on the high side.
> The deep tube lines will all get variations on the 2024 stock
I think that's a bit optimistic. Right now, the only thing that has confirmed orders is the replacement for the 1973 stock (Piccadilly line). The same order also has options for further trains which would cover the Bakerloo, Central and Waterloo & City lines, but somebody still needs to come up with the money for it.
For the Bakerloo line trains (1972 stock) that's probably going to happen, since those trains really are getting long in the tooth now, but for the Central/W&C line stock (1992 stock) there's currently a refurbishment programme underway, so depending on how that goes, those trains will probably continue running for a while further.
That still leaves the Northern and Jubilee lines (1995 and 1996 stock respectively), whose replacement trains, whenever they might happen, will probably need a new tender – it could be that whatever train gets selected then will be a close relative to the 2024 stock, but I don't think it's automatically a given.
And the Victoria line – that one only got new trains in 2009, so those will continue for quite a while further and will be the last ones due for replacement on the deep tubes.
That's a good point especially about Victoria, by the time a 2009 stock train is at its replacement age the "new tube for London" design is probably going to look pretty archaic and budgets are always too tight to make a replacement early. Who knows, by then TfL might actually have a "driverless train" plan for these lines which makes sense.
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