Hacker News Reader

Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

I was puzzled by the fact that this person seems to have remained in England and didn't even make it to Scotland. I guess they were taking only public transport service busses and not express long distance busses. Seems a bit arbitrary to me.

View on HN

In the UK that kind of service is known as a "coach" rather than a "bus" generally.

I remember way back when the Megabus from Edinburgh to London was the same type of bus as the one I used to go to school on :) And it cost 1 quid (plus 50p booking iirc).

Also, for GP, afaiu, the rules in Scotland are kinder (includes long distance) https://www.transport.gov.scot/concessionary-travel/60plus-o...

P.S. Hi Andy!

£1 plus 50p booking ads used to annoy me.

It’s £1.50-that’s the price!

The booking fee is per booking, not per ticket (at least it was about a decade ago when I last did this route with megabus).

So technically the ticket price can be as close to £1 as you want it to be.

I took that coach often and when I finally started making money I decided to splurge on the sleeper train and in time upgraded to a cabin. what luxury compared to megabus!

You could have booked the entire bus instead.

Arbitrary in the exact same sense as seeing how far you can go in any form of transport?

I think the confusion arises because in the US we call anything that is a bus that takes you somewhere else “traveling by bus” which apparently long haul trips are called traveling by coach in the UK.

So as an American my first thought was “heck I could probably get to LA from Kansas on a 24 hour bus trip” and to see this person traveled only a few hundred KM was confusing until that was clarified for me.

I thought maybe they were gonna end up in Russia or something crazy because I have no sense of how big Europe is.

Europe includes a lot more water than the USA (North Sea, Baltic Sea, half the Mediterranean Sea), which is obviously a barrier to a land journey, and makes a direct comparison difficult.

But otherwise, something like Lisbon to Moscow is very similar to the distance of LA to NYC.

Google's driving directions for these are 45 and 41 hours, respectively.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com