Cities
Where you sleep decides which version of a city you are given
Choosing a base is a sampling decision, and the district you wake up in supplies most of the evidence you…
Pranav Kulkarni
Consumer editor, The Next Postcard
Pranav joined to cover cities, slow routes, rail & road and stayed for the awkward questions and is happiest when a piece answers the question completely.
22 articles
Slow Routes
Flying compresses distance and overland travel hands it back
A flight removes the gradient between two places, and the gradient is the part that explains how they are…
Rail & Road
European rail fares are two different systems wearing one name
Some railways sell a right to travel and some sell a specific seat on a specific train, and nearly every…
Coast
An island is defined by its boat and by its winter timetable
Everything about visiting an island — cost, availability, risk and atmosphere — is downstream of how often…
Coast
A beach is a moving thing and the sand arrived from somewhere
Shorelines are a running balance between sediment arriving and sediment leaving, which is why beaches…
Travel Craft
School holidays set travel prices more reliably than weather does
Demand for travel is concentrated by institutional calendars rather than by climate, which is why the same…
Travel Craft
Fares move because seats are sold in batches at different prices
Airline and rail pricing is a system for rationing a fixed number of seats over time, and understanding the…
Rail & Road
Long-distance coaches reach the places the railway gave up on
A bus network is shaped by roads and by commercial freedom rather than by track, which makes it the densest…
Cities
An hour in one room beats a morning through a whole museum
Attention in a gallery runs out long before the legs do, and a large collection is built on the assumption…
Slow Routes
Following a river gives a journey a direction and a reason
Valleys concentrate roads, railways, towns and trade into a single corridor, which makes a river one of the…
Slow Routes
Altitude changes a town before it changes the visitor
Thin air alters cooking, weather, sunlight and building long before anyone notices it in themselves, which…
Rail & Road
A repeating timetable is built around connections, not around trains
Clockface timetables exist so that services meet each other at hub stations in a fixed pattern, which is…
Rail & Road
Tram, metro and light rail are legal categories more than vehicles
What separates urban rail modes is not the size of the train but whether it shares space with traffic, and…
Travel Craft
A forecast is a probability wearing the costume of a picture
Weather apps present model output as icons and certainties, and knowing what is underneath explains why…
Cities
Where a city found its water decided how far it could grow
Drinking water is the one requirement a settlement can’t negotiate around, and the answer to where it came…
Cities
A demolished wall usually survives as a ring road and a set of gate names
Town walls shaped the plan inside them so thoroughly that removing the stone changes surprisingly little…
Rail & Road
Funiculars, racks and cables solve a gradient the wheel cannot
Above a few per cent of slope an ordinary train stops working, and the machines that take over are chosen…
Slow Routes
The right moment to leave is usually before a place runs out
A stay follows a fairly consistent curve from disorientation to competence to diminishing return, and…
Rail & Road
A road number is a classification, and it predicts the drive
Numbering schemes encode who maintains a road and what standard it was built to, which makes the number on…
Coast
A small island loses its school before it loses its population
Depopulation on small islands runs through a predictable sequence of institutional closures, and each…
Coast
A delta is land the river is still delivering, and the delivery has slowed
River mouths that build land do so only while sediment keeps arriving, and much of what makes deltas…
Coast
Defending a coast means deciding which parts will not be defended
Sea walls and groynes are expensive, they move the problem along the shore, and the policy question…