I have been thinking about the map in this tweet. A short thread may follow
I don't dispute the general point the map is making - rail services in Scotland can and should be much, much better, and much more should be shifted from futile road widening schemes to rail improvements on the same routes. But...
There are a couple of main issues - firstly, the colour blocks north follow the rail lines closely, but do not for journeys south. The map implies a huge swathe of south and western Scotland are within an hour of Edinburgh. That's simply not the case, most has no rail service
Secondly, why does the service south seem so fast? That's because it's using Berwick and Lockerbie as the data points, both are served from Edinburgh directly by ECML/WCML expresses with no intermediate stops. Stretching the green colour between them is cause of the first point
Then there's the rather obvious point, that the map uses a non-linear scale. Everything up to 1 hour is green, then there's a 15 minute band, followed by a 1h15m then a 1h band followed by... nothing. Edinburgh to Gleneagles is 1h17m, so falls into the orange band.
Basically, what this map /really/ shows (if you discount the erroneous green blob to the south) is the distance from Edinburgh... Longer distance = longer journeys. It therefore misses some key points.
No, I've not made a map, sorry, I don't actually think that's the best way to present these data. I've made a table. 
This shows the actual journey length in track miles, the average scheduled journey time (so averages where fast/slow services offered), the average journey speed in mph and also the rail route directness, 0% would be a straight line, as it increases the journey is less direct
So for instance, Kirkcaldy there has a directness measure of 130%, that's because the journey by train has to go around the Forth and back on itself, so it's 130% longer than if you could go as the crow flies.
Firstly, those outliers at the top are where there are direct, non-stop services on non-Scotrail express trains, on high speed lines (ECML/WCML). I put in the Kings Cross journey as a yard stick for high speed domestic rail in the UK.
The average speed a Scotrail train is doing is around 40mph. Many of the journeys classified as "slow" (orange/yellow) are actually going faster than this, it's not that they are relatively slow as such, they just have a longer way to go.
And then there are the "quick" journeys (green) that are actually going slowly! Borders line to Tweedbank and the Fife Circle are prime commuter services to Edinburgh and yet are parochially slow. Old diesel traction + lots of stops + limited line capacity = slow.
The long distance services to Inverness and Aberdeen don't really go /that/ fast, and the routes aren't that direct, it's just that they have relatively few intermediate stops, therefore long sections of line where they can go fast to keep up the average speed.
So here is the same table, but sorted by total journey time (i.e. the index used on the map), but coded for how fast/slow it is relative to Scotrail average.
Unsurprisingly, there's a reasonably tight correlation between the distance from Edinburgh and the journey time, with obvious explanations for the few outliers
(in that chart, the lower the slope, the faster the journey, i.e. if you are going more distance in less time)
Anyway, the moral of the story is (are), that it's not just as simple as how long it takes you to get there, particularly when it's because that is far away. Yes, we should invest a lot, lot more in rail services north of Scotland. No, we shouldn't make wierd maps.
As is the custom, I made this thread into a handy webpage to make it easier to read threadreaderapp.com/thread/9973681…
Carrying on a bit, I have taken the liberty of re-drawing the original map to better reflect where there are stations, each "bubble" is a 10km radius from a station. Most of south is not rail served. I've also added a colour category for the missing 3h30m+
The 1-1h15m category I really don't like, it's far too narrow and it makes nearly everything west of Glasgow (which often involves a change at Glasgow) or north of Dundee into the orange category.
And here (h/t @talkporty) is where it gets interesting. Rail journeys expressed as a % of the equivalent road journey time. By and large, rail is faster, until you want to go to the further reaches of the rail network. To southwest and west Highland Scotland, rail is parochial
Look at all those places where rail is faster though, Livingston, Falkirk, Glasgow, Motherwell, Dunbar, Kirkcaldy.... all lie on the motorway or A-trunk road network and get to get from centre to centre, are heavily beaten by rail
Poor old @DumfriesRailway - from Edinburgh you have to go to all the way to Carlisle and then back on yourself, when you are only 10 miles from the high speed journey direct from Lockerbie
You could look at that and think "why are all those idiots driving down the M8 each day from West Lothian", but here's a point - connectivity to the stations in West Lothian is really poor. Just look on a map where Livingston's stations are for example, stuck on the fringes
If I visit my sister in East Calder for instance, I can get a faster train to Uphall and then slog it along traffic free but unsurfaced, overgrown old railway paths for 4 miles, or can get a slower, less frequent train to Kirkliston and have a quick 1 mile down a horrible A road.
The point is, leaving the car at home would be a lot more attractive, and save people a lot of time, if there was a direct and safe 5-15 minute walking or cycling route to their station.
And here we are. A map that compares the relative road and rail journey times. The greener it gets, the faster rail is, the redder, the faster the road is
If anyone fancies going on National Rail and Google, and noting down the road and rail journey times for some of the "blanks" particularly on the Highland lines, do feel free to send me them on a spreadsheet
