Mobilisation along with industrialisation enabled us to travel faster on longer distances easier. We build competing systems based on our market system for goods and persons like roads, trains and plaines. Ships for long distance travel got outdated quickly.
There are three options usually today going from one capital town to another. Take the car or bus using the road system, a train to go from a station to another swapping between Underground and High-Speed train or take a flight from an airport located in the outskirts.
Basic market rules force us as a society or market to turn travelling continuously more and more efficient.
Cars become more fuel efficient, trains faster and take more passengers, planes become more fuel efficient and larger. Planes already reached a maximum size it appears, because the latest super carrier contracts were cancelled again. Trains are running on schedules and reached their flexibility boarders, while road maintenance cuts down on car and bus travel comfort.
In the end of the day travelling, one of the most fundamental and important parts of our society, became so complex that overall travel starts to struggle.
Either way, planing a trip turned a nightmare.
I got stuck in Tromso when the Corona Pandemic kicked off. This area shortly above the polar circle has no train or bus station, but an airport and some car rentals. I needed to leave earlier as all foreigners were asked to leave the country by the Norwegian government, but all flights back to Frankfurt were cancelled.
Renting a car would have created tremendous additional cost if leaving the car at a different rental spot and driving through Sweden was off the contract, even so way faster, because it would have ment to cross borders.
Basically, I was not able to plan a trip back at all and instead I booked an available domestic flight to Bergen getting closer south and into a town with a train station. After a night there I managed to get a train ride to Oslo. Denmark locked down all borders and no trespassing was allowed neither, but I found a bus rout to Gothenbug that had a still running truck and also passenger ferry connection to Kiel from where I jumped on a train back into Hells Kitchen.
No online system was able to provide me with that connection. It was based only and entirely on my experience and knowledge of Europe's passenger travel system, being therefore hardly anything more than educated guessing.
Most humans don't think like that and would have started panicking being stuck north crying for an authority like their embassy to get them home.
The same mindset and character, the same skill set and attitude that keeps me an outsider in constant threat of poverty in this first world free society made me get home, but in an exceptional journey. Bergen is a beautiful and rich town I experienced in an exceptionally unusual quiet night with empty streets, the train ride goes through a pictoresk landscape of Noways south so very different from the polar circle area I spent a few weeks sleeping outside striding through the outskirts of a small town and ferry rides are always special being short but acceptable cruises.
No one that creates transport route planning systems and services thinks like me or has a mind set like me. Those lead software developers of all available transport platforms that can be found on your preferable search engine, even of MIT, would have, I take every bet, paniked being stuck calling their embassy.
Cyberpunks pull themselves out by their own hair, like an old German Baron named Münchausen that kept telling stories called full of lies by most or just beautiful imagination by some others.
If a system fails to work under stress it is bad in perfect conditions, too.
Just try to figure out how to get from "your" place in London or suburbia of London to "your" selected desired place with a defined amount of luggage, but creating the least amount of stress, the maximum amount of comfort to a reasonable price for a hopefully enriching journey to one other "your" capital city in Europe....
