Electric Buses in California

[RJ]

Jeremy -

Don't know if you're aware, but you can take all of England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and Ireland and drop them into California and they'd only take up a little over 60% of the size of the state.

The Irish think that a 175 km trip from Belfast to Dublin is so far, they stay overnight. In CA, that's a two hour drive from Fresno to Bakersfield on the motorway - easily round-tripped in a day.

Point being that it's extremely difficult to compare travel between the UK & EU with the States, simply due to the vastness of the country and the different population densities.  There's also no way that HSR (the politician's favorite acronym for High Speed Rail, aka Bullet Train) can compete with an airplane for trips like LA to Seattle, or SF > NYC. Heck, the CA politicians can't even comprehend that their "baby" HSR from SF>LA cannot compete with an airliner, so they continue to blow the taxpayer's money on the "train to nowhere. . ."

FWIW & HTH. . .

[Jeremy]

Yes I'm aware the UK is small, and I also wasn't trying to make any kind of wider point about the merits of train travel.

The point I WAS trying to make was that you can go badly wrong if you only consider something (eg. the price of fuel in another country) from your own perspective. In European terms fuel in the UK is comparatively cheap (Italy, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, France, Portugal etc etc are all more expensive), but compared to the US the reverse is true - but to make an intelligent comparison you need to compare prices in real terms (ie., affordability) by factoring-in family incomes, taxes paid, benefits received, and a whole bunch of other stuff as well

When comparing with the US specifically - and without making any political points either way - it's fair to say that European counties take a much more 'tax and spend' approach to things - so that for example a UK family will pay much more tax when buying fuel but will also get much more back in the form of free healthcare and child support and stuff like that, which I assume (correct me if I'm wrong!) isn't the case in the States. I'd also guess that the physical amount of vehicle fuel bought and consumed by a UK family each week/month/year is typically much lower than would be the case for an equivalent US family.

And of course all the above is completely outweighed by the most important factors of all, which are simply the expectations and experiences of the person paying for the fuel. If you are used to paying $1 per gallon and you hear on the TV news that the price is about to go to $1.50 you're going to feel like the world is coming to an end and that you may as well push both the TV and your bus off a cliff. But if you were already paying $5 a gallon and the TV says the price is going to $5.50 then that exact same price increase 'seems' much less important and you just sigh and change channel.

Jeremy