Post by Athel Cornish-BowdenPost by LewisPost by Peter YoungPost by b***@shaw.caPost by SnidelyPost by Peter Duncanson [BrE]I was temporarily misled by a news headline on the BBC website.
"Oxford United's coach stalled by alcohol spray"
Oxford United is a football club. The team has, of course, at least one
coach: "An instructor or trainer in sport".
Before I read the article I assumed that their coach had been
accidentally sprayed.
It turned out that the coach referrred to was the team bus: "A
comfortably equipped single-decker bus used for longer journeys".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-54310800
https://www.lexico.com/definition/coach
"It is thought some of the spray in the air was picked up by a device
that stops the coach driver starting the vehicle if alcohol has been
consumed." [loc cit]
I would have written "... that stop the coach driver /from/ starting
the vehicle ...."
Pondition, or just bibbeecee style?
Some of each. In North American English, the principal meaning of coach
is the on-field manager of a sports team. In other Englishes, it's a bus.
Not quite. In BrE "coach" is a long-distance bus.
Where "long-distance" is a distance relative to the UK. There are
certainly intracity coaches in the UK that over her would be part of the
normal bus routes and don't involve what we would think of as "long-
distance buses'.
There is one bus route in Denver that runs well over an hour from start
to end and covers in excess of 20 miles, for example.
Birmingham bus routes 11C and 11A, which date from 1923, are Europe's
longest routes, at 43 km for a complete circuit in 2 hours and 20
minutes, but effectively infinite, because you are not limited to a
single circuit.
So, a bit more than half as long as the one I mentioned, which is over
20 miles in one direction, over 60km for a round trip.
If you're hung up on 'circuit' then I don't know, as buses here pretty
much go from one point to another in a meandering route and then back on
the same exact route with maybe the slightest of variations for things
like one-way streets, and not in circles.
(And by here, I mean Denver, though my memories of the lines in the Bat
Area are similar that circular routes are either rares as hen's teeth or
nonexistent.
More details on local transit that you care about, most likely, follows.
There may well be some circular routes I am unaware of (I do not ride
the bus much and haven't for a long time. It takes me 12-14 minutes to
drive to "work" and it would take close to 6 times that to take a bus to
a train and walk. And at many times when I am going, taking a bus and
train wold be impossible or take multiple hours of waiting since buses
do not run 24 hours and neither do the trains).
Right now it is 5am, and the bus to the train is still running on its
once an hour schedule, so I would either walk 15 minutes to the nearest
bus, wait 22 minutes for it, then wait another 15 minutes for the train,
or I could walk 29 minute to a different train stop wait only 6 minutes
for that train, which takes longer to get where I am going. Total time
is either 63 minutes or 72 minutes. In either case I could drive there,
go in and reboot a recalcitrant machine, get a coffee to-go from the
coffee shop next door, and be back home in less time.
And let's not even mention that bus schedules, though printed, have as
little meaning as a politician's campaign promise. The major line nearest
my house is suppose to run every 15 minutes during busy times (basically
most of the morning and then late afternoon) and I have OFTEN waited
more than 30 minutes for a bus. And I do not, as I mentioned above, ride
the bus very often. The trains are better at keeping to a schedule, but
it hardly matters if you rely on the bus to get you to the trains. This
is why many people drive to the train (Park-n-Ride) if they are going
into the central part of the city and many other have someone else drive
and drop them off (Kiss-n-Ride).
All Park-n-Rides (PnR) can be used as Kiss-n-Rides (KnR), but no KnR
can be used as a PnR.
--
At night when the bars close down
Brandy walks through a silent town
And loves a man who's not around