alexZam Wed May 06, 2015 3:46 am
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High-speed rail
FlyAkwaThe Acela Express between Washington, DC and Boston, an unusually fast train in American trains, is only about as fast as the bright yellow lines on this map of Europe's passenger rail network. The orange, red, and purple lines are faster than anything we have in the USA. You can see that the very best train routes are dominated by France and Spain, who've invested mightily in passenger rail. But the links between London, Lille, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Liège are the most noteworthy in terms of the mix of speed, distance, and number of cities served. In a typically European fashion, these crucial links cross several national boundaries. The formerly communist countries, meanwhile, are essentially American in their neglect of high-speed rail.
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Europe's busiest airports
PemFRThis is every European airport that moves more than 100,000 annual passengers, with the size of the dot scaled to the volume of air traffic. The map was made using data from 2009, which was a terrible year in general for aviation thanks to the great recession, so total volumes are likely bigger today. By and large the biggest cities see the most air travel, though one important exception is that Berlin in northeastern Germany is a relative minnow in terms of air traffic — Germany's biggest airport by far is in the smaller western city of Frankfurt. That's in large part a legacy of the city's anomalous Cold War politics, and is supposed to be fixed after the much-delayed new Berlin-Brandenburg Airport is finally completed.
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