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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> I would have thought Croatia to be small enough to not need such a system; i.e. supermarkets not further than half an hour drive away.

I still think about the UK. I cannot imagine anywhere in the UK being more than an hour or two from anywhere else.

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I’m American but was living in Seoul at the time.

A couple friends and I took an overnight trip to Busan. We were having lunch at a small restaurant, and my friend asks the staff if she can order takeout and have it sent back to her home in Seoul. Mind you Busan to Seoul is 325km.

This was mind-boggling to me. I asked her, “How long is that gonna take to get there?!” She was puzzled, looked at me and said, “It’ll be there later tonight.” She then laughed and continued, “Hey, this is Korea!”

The delivery network of small highly developed countries is simply amazing.

Wow... how does this sort of delivery network work? Is it inexpensive enough to manage food takeout? I've never heard of takeout food delivery across 100s of kilometers, especially same day! I really need to visit Korea

The food was already sealed and safe for travel. Can't recall clearly, but I think it was some dried fish or sausage dish. So it was just a manner of getting it delivered. She ordered a lot and didn't want the hassle of us lugging it with us during the remainder of our day.

Still, impressive nonetheless.

The German Railway used to deliver packages with the regular high speed rail system. You bring it to the train, it gets put in a cargo room, and you arrange for someone to pick it up at the destination station.

It was expensive of course since it was the fastest way to move stuff (trains are faster than cars), but I imagine that at cost it would be cheap enough for takeout.

They still have a courier service:

https://www.bahn.de/p/view/angebot/zusatzticket/ic_kurier.sh...

Delivery can also be done to Paris, Vienna, Basel and Amsterdam along with the ICE trains travelling there.

Prices I'm shown ~0,22 EUR/km, 33€ to and from the station each and a surcharge of 33€ for night or holiday transport, so ~300€ for crossing the country, and it takes less than a day. Maybe there are rich people out there paying that much for takeout?

What you're not taking into the account is the standard of living though. This is totally how some rural communities in Poland worked not that long ago, and you could also say "but hey, Poland is fairly compact, you could drive from the village X to a larger city which has stores in like 30 minutes, what's the deal?", forgetting that for a long time the only vehicle in a village might have been an agricultural tractor, a lot of "daily business" travelling was still done with a horse and a cart. Besides, those rural communities had staples produced locally - my auntie always had a cellar filled to the brim with potatoes, milk from a cow, eggs from chickens, they'd butcher a pig from time to time so a freezer was usually full of meat, local bakery would get a delivery of flour from elsewhere. It's just that "hopping over to a town nearby for shopping" wasn't really an option until mid-90s at least, when the market got absolutely flooded with cheap cars and people found the ability to afford them.

I asked my mom if/where they got yeast in the 50s and 60s, and she said that once a week, a lady would arrive on horse/donkey and trade everyone for their eggs.

They probably had a train connection link somewhere that went to/from a big city and that’s how it all worked.

They had milk and pork, but generally sold/traded that for everything else they needed: oil, salt, sugar, etc. And of course some monetary savings for their escape!

The stereotypical longest possible UK trip, from Land's End to John O'Groats, is occasionally walked or cycled as a charity event. It's a 14h drive.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/John+o'+Groats/Lands+end,+Pe...

The southwest most point and the northmost point are tourist attractions. The eastmost point is a small marker in an industrial estate next to the gasworks in Lowestoft.

The Scottish Highlands are generally not very accessible and you'll often be charged extra postage by Ebay vendors. There's a single good road that runs north from Edinburgh. Beyond that it's twisty little single track roads on which it's difficult to make good speed safely without risking hitting a sheep round a blind corner.

"it's twisty little single track roads"

There are a lot of single track roads - but there are also a lot of perfectly decent A class roads linking the main areas.

NB By single track I mean single track with passing places:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-track_road

There are still a few places in Scotland which operate on such a system (I spent a bunch of time in one of them growing up and still go there at least once a year). There's a fish van and a meat + fresh produce van which comes on a (relatively) predictable schedule. Nearest supermarket is 2-3 hours drive, more due to road quality than physical distance, so people still go there semi-regularly and generally run big deep freezes.

Why? UK includes Scotland, and you can easily go 600+ miles from a point in northern Scotland to southern England. Even in England, Liverpool is 200+ miles from London, and there are farther places in England.

Yeah, I think it's just someone from the US thinking in their terms. Florida is 447 miles itself.

600 miles? I had no idea Great Britain was that small. What is the widest distance West to East?

Per Encyclopedia Britannica[0], 300 miles is the widest, and no part is more than 75 miles from the sea.

It's smaller in land mass than 10 US states, coming in just behind Oregon and just ahead of Idaho.

0 - https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom

"an hour or two from anywhere else"

A few moments with Google maps and I found two places in Scotland that are ~23 hours apart by car. :-) And Scotland is only a small part of the UK.

Is there anywhere in Scotland more than two hours from any town? Only on some islands, I think (Unst is 2½ hours from Lerwick.)

I don't think so - at least if you exclude islands and villages on the mainland not connected to the rest of the road network (Inverie being the only one I'm aware of).

I was contemplating a post-lockdown trip to Shetland and was looking at the ferry times to Papa Stour which made me think of this!

NB 14.5 hours to get to Lerwick from where I live in Scotland and a couple of hours to get from Lerwick to Papa Stour.

If you allow private roads - then I think Fealar Lodge is about 2 hours from Pitlochry.

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