“In recent years, moreover, some French cartographers who think about the social effects of train transportation have taken to creating new maps of Europe that simultaneously reflect the time and the distance between cities. These ‘time space’ drawings of France (the technical name is anamorphic maps) have a distorted look as if someone crumpled a paper rendering of the country and pulled all the surrounding cities closer to Paris than they really are. Marseille is half its real distance from the capital, as are Strasbourg and Lyon. Mostly this is because of the TGV, which seems to have knit the country together in a way that air travel never did. Alain L’Hostis, a geographer at the Université Paris-Est, told me that the train has undoubtedly changed the psychological distance between places. For the French, he said, the mobility has created among many citizens ‘a feeling of belonging to a common or interconnected city.’” — Getting Up to Speed - NYTimes.com
