[lambfruit]

I built this. I expected to find the pub everyone in London could reach within an hour. There isn't one.

Nothing clears 65 minutes either. The first pubs all 33 boroughs can reach turn up at 70 minutes, and there are exactly two of them, less than a hundred metres apart by Great Portland Street.

The maths has no opinion on beer. The winner is a Greene King, number four is a Wetherspoon above Baker Street station, and number three is an alcohol-free brewery's flagship.

How I did it: each borough starts where its people actually live, not its geographic middle (2021 census). I timed journeys to all 3,170 pubs in OpenStreetMap with R5, an open-source routing engine, on published bus and rail timetables. Every pub, not a sample, so the shortlist can't have missed a fairer one.

The best 218 were then re-timed on TfL's own Journey Planner, fastest route arriving by 7pm on a Thursday. Only those TfL numbers are published.

Caveats: one arrival time on one day. Journeys include walking, waiting and changes. Timetables shift, so expect the odd minute of drift. The full ranked dataset is a CSV on the page if anyone wants to check it.

[lozenge]

It's cute but after a paragraph or two I immediately thought, let me choose what Burroughs I care about and get a result. However, the link to do this was way, way down the page.

[Spare_account]

Is there any (non-pub) location in London that could satisfy the 60 minute requirement?

[ben_w]

Conveniently, I've put together an isochrone map generator:

https://benwheatley.github.io/Isochrone/web/?region=london&c...

The origin point selected here is roughly Mermaid House, on the north side between the Millennium Bridge and Blackfriars station.

My route-finding here is more than a little naïve, instant acceleration to each road's speed limit, full-speed turns, no traffic, lights always with you, etc. but there is a place within 60 minutes of all locations, pre-selected in that URL.

Google Maps gives quite broad time ranges if you say you're travelling at 02:00, so there to e.g. Langleybury House & Film Centre, just inside the M25 in Watford, is 45m to 65m.

[leoedin]

> My route-finding here is more than a little naïve, instant acceleration to each road's speed limit, full-speed turns, no traffic, lights always with you, etc. but there is a place within 60 minutes of all locations, pre-selected in that URL.

It's an interesting project, but that makes it completely worthless.

Nobody's driving to central London anyway - journey times are measured by public transport. And even if they were driving, the journey times by car are completely dictated by traffic. The average weekday speed in central London is 7.1 mph.

What question does this answer? Where can me and all my friends meet in our cars at 2am?

[ben_w]

> Nobody's driving to central London anyway - journey times are measured by public transport. And even if they were driving, the journey times by car are completely dictated by traffic. The average weekday speed in central London is 7.1 mph.

Sure, one of my original intents was to get public transit data and include it. Turns out that's somewhat harder to get right than car/foot/cycle routing with OSM map data.

[PaulRobinson]

Logically, no, as they all neighbour non-pub locations. There's a coffee shop or restaurant within a minute or two of each of the top 5, from memory.

There used to be some UK celebs (David Baddiel, Clive Anderson, others...), who used to regularly eat in a restaurant near the Crown & Anchor after their weekly 5-a-side football games, which is why it stands out in my mind.

[Spare_account]

>Logically, no, as they all neighbour non-pub locations.

I don't understand this response, so I am wondering if I phrased my question badly.

The linked article established that there is no pub in London that can be reached within 60 minutes travel time by anyone starting from any home in any London borough.

I was wondering if there is any other location, be it a coffee shop, a park or even just a point in the middle of a road somewhere, that can be reached within 60 minutes by anyone who lives anywhere in London.

[PaulRobinson]

OK, short version: no.

And logically this makes sense, because you can see the pub problem as a subset of locations within all locations, and all of these pubs are clustered around an equidistant point at ~72 minutes from everywhere in London. If such a location existed, it would have to be within that cluster, but somehow an average of > 12 minutes travel to all those pubs in that grouping. An eye ball test on a map tells you that isn't possible.

You might be asking "is there another location without pubs that is more equidistant", and mathematically that could yield a coffee shop, except in London it won't because the equidistant point for all of London and the equidistant pub basically are at the same point to within hundreds of yards, because of how public transport and public houses are distributed across all boroughs.

[CamouflagedKiwi]

I think pretty unlikely: there is enough pub density that it's unlikely that removing that requirement nets 10 minutes of saved journey time from all the furthest destinations.

[saaaaaam]

> The maths has no opinion on beer.

Slop has no opinion on good writing either. My heart sank when I opened your website. I genuinely thought it was going to be interesting and it was just a screed of AI gibberish.

[dcminter]

It's not "gibberish", but it's got the stink of AI prose about it. The author's comments here do too.

Of course I might just be over-sensitised to certain turns of phrase and the author might be completely abstaining from bot commenting, but it has that overpowering flavour to it for me.

So to the author, if you are using AI to write your text, you might want to re-consider. Something superficially less polished might in fact be more appealing.

[dbbk]

Take your slop somewhere else

[IshKebab]

> I built this.

Oh hi Claude, how are you doing?

[tkgally]

Yeah, that post really sounded like Claude to me, too.

I use Claude for various projects of my own, so I read its prose a lot. Its writing style seems to be becoming increasingly idiosyncratic, which might be a good thing.

When I release something it wrote, though, I try to make the origin clear. For example:

https://tkgally.github.io/ai-semantics/