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Comment by NoZebra120vClip | Hacker News Reader

So, Google Maps informs me that a single £15.99 bus will get there in about 9 hours, 15 minutes. That's a good bit of distance across Great Britain, but GB's not really big compared to the United States, China, or Russia. I really wonder what's the longest route you could contrive across a really big country using only "local" public transit. I suspect that you could actually get really far through New England or the Eastern Seaboard, and that you'd have a lot of trouble going east-west across the western United States. But it'd be cool to try!

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There aren't really local buses in the USA outside of cities. I noticed it when I started traveling the globe. Many developed countries have virtually no transport outside of cities, other than via car. If they have a train or regional bus, it's typically one route to get you from one side of the country to another.

According to rome2rio.com, you can take a train from Albany, NY to Buffalo, NY. But to get from Albany to Wellsville, NY, you'd have to take a train to Buffalo, connecting service to Mt. Morris, and then still drive a car an hour and a half to get to Wellsville.

To get from Albany to where I live in NY, I would have to take three once-a-day regional buses, and still drive a car 30 minutes.

Technically, there are a lot of large counties which have networks of "local" transportation where you can get from one end of the county to another without leaving a single system. For example, in San Diego you could easily get from Chula Vista to Encinitas on MTS buses. It may take you a lot of transfers. But this example is, arguably "outside of cities" because San Diego County is a large, densely-populated area that's made up of many more cities than San Diego proper. The same goes for Los Angeles and counties of the Bay Area.

I think the challenge for a "local-only" expedition is where one county ends and the other begins, and the local bus service may not necessarily serve a convenient point to transfer in-between.

> £15.99 bus

From a US/Canadian perspective, that is incredible value. A one-way bus trip between Vancouver and Seattle costs CAD 26, which is just about the same price in pounds as the LON-EDI trip, but the distance is less than half.

A roughly equivalent bus trip for me would be Vancouver to Calgary, for which the bus ticket costs $170 / £105.

Long distance buses in Britain often need to compete with a train booked a few days ahead.

In this case, there are trains from Edinburgh to London at least twice an hour through the day, taking half the time and with much more legroom, better seats, a fairly spacious toilet, probably someone selling drinks and snacks from a trolley or bar counter, tables between seats, no road noise or pollution (it's electric), and a view.

https://www.seat61.com/london-to-edinburgh-by-train.htm

The days of 99p tickets on Megabus are gone, but booking ahead it's still just £6.88 from London to Manchester on Megabus. Mind you, Ryanair will fly you from London to Venice for £9.99.

Define “local”. Outside of Massachusetts (MBTA), I don’t recall hearing much about public transit in New England. The commuter rail probably gets you close to New Hampshire. Not sure how far you get from there.

You can get from south of Tijuana to north of Ventura on local transit depending on what you define as local. Iirc it may be all possible on local transit busses (no metrostink).

This YouTuber went from NYC pretty far north in Connecticut by free buses:

https://youtu.be/HX6C3MqH6EE

"It's fare free, why don't they open the back door too? It would expedite the boarding process"

Just goes to show how poorly thought out transit is in North America.

https://youtu.be/HX6C3MqH6EE?t=151

NYC is right by connecticut and connecticut is tiny to begin with. How far can "far north" be?

I've found that people often mean 'far East' in CT when they say 'far North' (because 95 runs E-W), in which case it's a few hours' drive to cross CT, IIRC.

Really far if you're using free local buses! Not that far if you're using trains and/or cars.

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