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Comment by edderly | Hacker News Reader

> He added that he had opted to stay in a tent as it was easier and cheaper than commuting from his home in Perth, although his camping equipment had disappeared by Friday afternoon.

Perth and the Dunfermline site are roughly 30 miles apart, on public transport the trip would take roughly 2 hours.

Sounds like a great idea castigate an employer in a semi-rural area with piss poor public transportation.

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Honestly, you're never going to have good public transportation in rural areas. There simply isn't the density to support it. It's a given that efficient transportation in such areas happens via car, which is a huge problem if you're working a job at a place like an Amazon warehouse that doesn't pay enough money to be able to easily afford a car.

Some potential future network of public transportation provided via self-driving cars excepted.

There's hourly buses from Perth to Dunfermline and very infrequent direct trains: the real problem isn't the ruralness of it, it's getting out to the industrial estate on the edge of town where Amazon's site is located that makes it take so long.

Ruralness is the exact problem, though. That's why the buses are only hourly and trains are infrequent: Not enough population density to justify the increased expense of running more. I live in Manhattan, and trains and buses are waaaay more frequent.

Right, but at the same time there's still a very large difference between a token, once-a-day service and an hourly service: an hourly service is sufficient for many to use it for commuting (and while I haven't ever been on the X55, the majority of other buses in the area which have hourly services are heavily used by commuters and I've seen them have to turn passengers away upon occasion).

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