Hacker News Reader

Comment by uuyi | Hacker News Reader

Good on you Europe. Here in the UK we are heavily investing in rail replacement busses at the moment.

Bus networks are a pretty decent solution as well. Rail is very expensive and there's not that many regions where you can operate it economically. In particular with electrical busses becoming better you can shift a lot of traffic away from personal vehicles on existing infrastructure.

Rail replacement buses are what the rail companies lay on when they can't run their trains because of some failure. It isn't an investment in the way you interpreted it.

fyi GP’s post is sarcasm. In UK “rail replacement bus” means the train route is cancelled and there’s a replacement bus instead.

Bus networks can work over small high density areas. Johannesburg has been building a bus network with exclusive lanes for years, but it’s designed to work in conjunction with its part complete metro. Cambridge, UK, has limited “busways” which connect the local villages. However, over large distances, I fail to see how buses can be more efficient. A single train can move hundreds of people over hundreds of kilometres, at much higher speeds than a bus, and with very little pollution.

> However, over large distances, I fail to see how buses can be more efficient.

I'd say it can work if there's no existing railway and/or there's not a lot of people traveling this way. Or maybe for short duration, like one or two months a year

The UK is a European country. Not in the EU anymore, but you folks didn't move continents ;-)

To be pedantic, they never were on the continent :)

Apart from Gibraltar I guess

*stares at continental shelf depth map around the UK described on old European map on wall

Ha yes well... "the continent" refers to the European land mass. C.f. "continental breakfast". But the UK is part of the European continent in the continental shelf sense. The word "continent" is not really well defined. Here's a nice video about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrsxRJdwfM0

It does seem poorly defined. If it were the land mass, I would expect that Europe extended all the way to the other end of Russia.

Never you say? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

Culturally we generally consider Europe to mean continental Europe i.e. Europe without the islands. Thus the U.K. being an island nation isn’t part of Europe.

But the definition of Europe will change depending on who you’re talking to and what your talking about.

In my experience, the UK is culturally very similar to the rest of Europe (much more similar then we are to the US, although there is some influence there). This fact is just obscured by the language barrier.

What language barrier? English is a Germanic language with a lot of French vocabulary. Close to Dutch. It isn’t like Basque or Hungarian.

Mostly British people's poor education in languages. It's not that other European languages would be hard for us to learn, it's that most people in the UK de facto don't learn another language to a useful level (presumably because English is so widely spoken that we can get away without doing so). Which makes it very difficult for most of us to engage with European culture, media, etc even though it's often quite similar to our own and I suspect would otherwise interest us.

Culturally we Icelanders consider Europe to mean continental Europe i.e. Europe minus the volcanic islands.

In the UK, 'Europe' in this kind of context has almost always meant 'the continental mainland'. That's not a Brexit thing - that's the terminology for as long as I've been alive.

I see. Makes perfect sense — I appreciate the cultural context.

When an English person says "Europe", they mean the continental part.

I'd say the UK situation has some good, some bad.

A lot of the rail replacement currently is due to staff sickness ... Covid has hit a lot of things very badly.

Positively, the government has heavily supported rail through the pandemic. (estimated 22 billion pounds in 2020-21, up from 11 billion in 2019-20) (1)

Mostly to make up for loss of passenger ticket income.

Investment in High Speed 2 is also continuing despite the current situation, which I'm relatively hopeful about.

On the other hand the government has demanded cutbacks on operations to possibly 80% or less of pre-covid, and there seems to be a lot of overcrowding in some areas where the demand has rebounded faster. There is also a fairly widespread withdrawal of much of the onboard catering :-(

(1) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com