[rsynnott]

Yes. Though I’ve been paintballing once or twice, years ago; looks like the place I did it is an hour away (two buses, 10 minute walk) or 30 mins by car. Got to admit shooting never even crossed my mind, but there seem to be a few rifle ranges about an hour away. There seems to generally be a lot of this stuff in the outer suburbs.

My visits to the US have been fairly limited, and mostly to San Francisco, so I’m not sure how typical this is, but one thing that surprised me about San Francisco was that, while there’s a reasonably extensive public transport system in the actual city, it more or less stops dead once you leave. Here, it certainly fades out, but areas where suburban becomes rural are often fairly accessible.

[9530jh9054ven]

Perhaps. Forgive me for doing so, I did google some rifle ranges in Ireland and the only comparable rifle range to the one I'm speaking of is the Midlands National Shooting Center of Ireland near Tullamore, and it has similar problem to what I was talking about for our long range facilities. We have smaller ranges I think similar to the the ones I believe you're talking about much closer to the city limits and a handful of indoor ranges within city limits.

>but one thing that surprised me about San Francisco was that, while there’s a reasonably extensive public transport system in the actual city, it more or less stops dead once you leave.

I suppose it's a jurisdiction issue. The city here is quick to expand bus service whenever the borders expand or to new communities, but they do not service anything outside of the limits whatsoever. There's little in the way of public transit outside of the municipal level.

[rsynnott]

Yeah, that might be the difference. We used to have a national system and a Dublin system, but the Dublin system had a very expansive definition of ‘Dublin’ and operated well outside the Dublin local authorities. We now have a national system, though in practice Dublin and area is still a bit of a special case.