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British woman undertakes trip from London to Edinburgh using only £2 local buses
- NoZebra120vClip 4y agoSo, 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!
- bombcar 4y agoYou 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).
- clintonb 4y agoDefine “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.
- blamazon 4y agoThis YouTuber went from NYC pretty far north in Connecticut by free buses: https://youtu.be/HX6C3MqH6EE https://youtu.be/HX6C3MqH6EE
- bailoon 4y agoNYC is right by connecticut and connecticut is tiny to begin with. How far can "far north" be?
- QuarterReptile 4y agoI'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.
- blamazon 4y agoReally far if you're using free local buses! Not that far if you're using trains and/or cars.
- Scoundreller 4y ago"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 https://youtu.be/HX6C3MqH6EE?t=151
- throwaway892238 4y agoThere 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.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y agoTechnically, 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.
- deepspace 4y ago> £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.
- whenc 4y agoThe 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.
- Symbiote 4y agoLong 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 https://www.seat61.com/london-to-edinburgh-by-train.htm
- version_five 4y agoA few years ago this guy documented going as far from London as he could on local busses, it was very interesting. Apparently he's since done a follow up on trains, which I have not read https://twitter.com/politic_animal/status/1428438081871433731 https://twitter.com/politic_animal/status/142843808187143373...
- blamazon 4y agoA YouTuber I follow did New Jersey south to north on local buses: https://youtu.be/vnn7xooTxl8 https://youtu.be/vnn7xooTxl8
- whenc 4y agoMiles is good fun. Also Manhattan to Montauk on local buses: https://youtu.be/fKQmp0spxhs https://youtu.be/fKQmp0spxhs
- ColinWright 4y agoI remember an occasion in the mid 1980s when Tom Körner needed to get from Cambridge to Leeds and there was both a national train strike and a national coach strike. Simon Norton sat down and wrote an itinerary for Tom that did the journey using only local bus services. From memory.
- sriram_malhar 4y agoThis is such a lovely coverage of so many things British ... simultaneous national train and coach strikes, a boffin committing bus services to memory. Only thing lacking was a mention of tea :)
- ColinWright 4y agoI should have included, then, that Tom mentioned the problem in the tea break, and Simon sat down and wrote his itinerary on the spot. So it all happened in a tea break. It's a true story, and if I remember I might even be able to get Tom to confirm it. But even true stories need to be told well, and your observation makes it better. Thank you.
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoPlease be considerate with your words. Going on strike simultaneously for trains, buses, trams, schools and recently air controllers is a tradition reserved for us French.
- shaftoe444 4y ago> She plans to get the train back to London on Sunday evening.
- BayesianDice 4y agoI wondered if, being a Sunday evening on the British train system, she'd find herself on a rail replacement bus service for some of the return journey. But luckily not - just some diversions because of engineering work adding 60 minutes to the usual journey times...
- hotdamnson 4y agoI did something like that going from Sao Paulo (Brazil) to Leticia (Colombia) following the coast toward north and later taking amazon river cargo ships. It took me about 5 months, transit days about 2 months.
- Scoundreller 4y agoI'd like to subscribe to your blog
- theGnuMe 4y agoThere's a movie that precedes this about a widow who travels from Scotland to Lands End via local buses.
- Karellen 4y ago> on Saturday, she became waylaid after her card was declined – something which later transpired to be because she had carried out more than the permitted number of Apple Pay transactions in a single day. I thought the point of contactless payments, like with Apple Pay, was that there are fairly low per-transaction spend limits because it's "supposed" to be used for all the little purchases you make throughout the day. But if there are also strict transaction volume limits, what the heck is the point? "Yeah, you can use this payment method for some of your small purchases during the day, but you still have to carry cash for the rest." Like, WTF? Or you could just stick with cash, and not allow a 3rd party to decide how often you can spend your money, or who you can spend it with. Or keep track of who you spend it with (and presumably sell that data to advertisers^W"partners", like you agreed they could.)
- squiffsquiff 4y agoThis is unlikely to have been an Apple pay specific issue. There's a lot of transaction pattern matching on card payments in the UK. You may get your transactions blocked if the card provider thinks they're suspicious. You can contact your provider and get it unblocked again. In this case it's pretty clearly uncharacteristic behaviour by any measure, including the geographical movement between transactions.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago"Uncharacteristic". Every time I read about cases like this, my mind repeats the phrase that is a title of a niche (but prophetic) song I've heard long time ago: random is resistance.
- timonoko 4y agoYou can travel from Helsinki to Tromsø on a local bus. 1500 km, 24 hours, 150€. Albeit it is "local" only between Oulu and Kilpisjärvi as it stops everywhere and delivers mail. Achually the Baja bus from Tijuana to Cabo is very much the same experience and and also "local" in same sense.
- smallerdemon 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7dl42TsP84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7dl42TsP84 Tokyo to Osaka by local train only. 11 hours.