Top 10 Most Expensive Rail Routes by Price per km

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Rail pricing – a global comparison There are some things in life you can be sure of – death, taxes and UK rail fares going up every year. By coincidence, I was just finishing up a quick bit of research on rail journey prices and cost over distance, when news of the latest price hike broke. In this article, the claim that the UK has the highest rail fares in Europe is investigated. It is something I’ve often thought about, and how it compares globally, but is this true? The take from the ‘Reality Check’, is that the UK is the most expensive bought onRead More →

Eurovision points from Finland

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And now the points from… I wasn’t even planning on another post about the Eurovision Song Contest and the voting geography of this crazy contest. However, messing around on data and geospatial visualisation platforms, and the urge became too strong. So twelve months on here I am again, examining the predictability of voting patterns. The Balkans bloc, the Scandinavian bloc, the former Soviet bloc – you know the drill, so I’ll spare going through the context again – I’ve explored this previously in 2018 and 2017.  Data viz for the Euroviz What’s new for this year are interactive data visualisations where you can explore a country’sRead More →

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Unique Sporting Landscape There was a sporting story a few weeks ago about some Patriotic football team from New England winning a record number of ‘Bowls’ last week and somehow male sheep and Maroon 5 were involved. I’m learning a lot about American culture, even falling in with love in many respects, but it’s going to take some time for this blogger to fully understand American football. American culture is a unique, great and fascinating one – a product of its pioneering, multicultural, diverse history and background of starting a country anew. I could easily do an article about the food culture and diversity ofRead More →

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I sense your presents… Wintertime in Western culture is known for the religious and pagan traditions of gift-giving, merriment and feasting around Christmas. Commonly across many cultures, it is considered Santa Claus delivers gifts. Last year we asked, ‘where’ does Santa come from? This year we are looking into ‘how’ – namely how does Santa Claus (or whichever gift-bringer) navigate and deliver their gifts? Using a map of course! We can only guess on the actual map Santa uses – but I imagine that it could look like something like the stylised map below which I hope you enjoy. Several cultures have different figures whoRead More →

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Further depth Those who’ve explored this site in the past will know that I have analysed the geography of train networks on multiple occasions, particularly in the United Kingdom. Maybe it’s my bias being a rail commuter, but it’s a topic I’m returning to again! Access to train networks shapes many people’s lives – and is two-fold. Am I near to a station and are the trains reliable? To investigate ‘access’, we start by exploring the relationship between population density and station density in the UK. Are there ‘gaps’ in train station provision? Next we examine then the temporal and spatial patterns of train punctuality.Read More →

Example of Carto Builder

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That web map looks great! Wish I could make one… In some ways, there has maybe not been a better time to be involved in the geospatial and cartographic industry, whether as a profession or as hobby/passing interest. While ‘static’ maps and images of geographical information and data visualisation are still very relevant and useful, the rise of the interactive web map is an increasingly trend which is hitting the ‘mainstream’ more and more, whether it be through maps in current affairs like election maps, or through games or social media (e.g. Pokemon Go! and SnapMap). Therefore, the ability for cartographers and geospatialists to haveRead More →

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So this isn’t strictly a GIS or mapping tool or tip that I thought I’d share, but considering the amount of time and importance of joins, spreadsheets, datasets and databases in the profession, or even outside geospatial work, this little tool called ‘Fuzzy Lookup’ may come in handy. Often when trying to query, search or join up one table to another, or for whatever purpose, VLOOKUP can do just the job, ‘vertically looking up’ one value, in order to display another. If you are new or unfamiliar to VLOOKUP, Debra Dalgleish has an awesome blog, Contextures to help with this and much more even forRead More →