andy.hilmer

Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on The Northern Wild: How to Save New York?
  Yup. Leith and Edinburgh used to be separate cities (Leith being the port, Edinburgh being the inland capital) but they formally merged around 1905, acknowledging that what had been open countryside in 1805 was now wall-to-wall tenements and warehouses. Again, Leeds and Bradford are separate cities, but you can drive (or walk -- they're only 10 miles apart, center to center) from one to the other and never even see open countryside. Actually, the whole M62 corridor from Liverpool through to Hull is dangerously close to going that way -- IIRC five of the ten largest cities in the UK...
• Charlie Stross commented on The Northern Wild: How to Save New York?
  If we ever do get to that point, I think we're still going to see physically compact, dense, cities: network latency and bandwidth is limited by the speed of light and the density with which we can physically build circuits. You can see that today in stock exchanges, with dealer firms and market makers desperately trying to buy the equipment rack closest to the market's core routers in the data centre where trading takes place, just to shave a millisecond off their trading time -- or even a few microseconds ......
• Charlie Stross commented on The Northern Wild: How to Save New York?
  On the other hand, an off-peak second class day return from EDI to GLA (any station) costs almost £10 at walk-up prices. Compare to the maximum ~£6 fare for a daily travelcard in London, and it imposes quite a bottleneck: what we have isn't an integrated commuter transport system but a short-range inter-city connection, and the net effect is to isolate the populations of the two cities from routinely crossing over. (Except for commuters with season tickets.)...
• Bellinghman commented on The Northern Wild: How to Save New York?
  Ahem: ~£16 should you wish to include zones 1 to 6. Me, I have an Oystercard which I tend to use only for Cockfosters <-> Oxford Circus off-peak returns: that is £6 and is a reasonable comparison with your EDI <-> GLA link....
• Bellinghman commented on The Northern Wild: How to Save New York?
  I think there's another one developing: Baletchinton. That's the Baldock/Letchworth/Hitchin/Luton/Dunstable mass running along the A505. There's still a decent gap between Luton and Hitchin — all 5 miles of it, with but a small village in it — but current development plans are to infill between them. Apart from that, there's about half a mile between the outskirts of Hitchin and Letchworth. Oh yeah, you could use another 2 miles of infill to link Stevenage into that mass from the south. It ain't a city yet, but I think it's going that way. It's got an international airport already. What...