(I am bored and wandering around the Wikipedia. I fell into the articles on American bus companies.)
Since the US has (practically) no intercity trains and the air system is overloaded, you would think bus companies would do well. You would be wrong. Ridership is way down. Why is that? How could we improve it? How do other nations do bus transport ‘right?’
Some thoughts, Higher-priced elite long-haul buses. Cabin service, movies, all of that.
Integrate commuter buses better with long-haul buses.
Serve cities with no air service.
Adopt the model from Latin American ‘Public Cars.’ No bus unless there are passengers. If you have a lot of passengers, you add more buses. use lots of smaller buses to only provide only the seats you need.
I see some problems with a couple of these ideas:both of these parts.
How does this work for intermediate passengers? Say a route from Chicago to Minneapolis. There are no passengers in Chicago, so the bus doesn’t leave. But what about a passenger waiting to get on in Milwaukee heading for Minneapolis? The bus will never arrive for him. Does he have to somehow notify the Chicago station that he is waiting in Milwaukee, so they send the bus out (even though it leaves Chicago empty)?
This doesn’t seem cost-effective. The major expense of such buses is the salary of the driver. If you send 2 20-passenger buses instead of one 40-passenger bus, you’re paying 2 drivers when one could do the job.
There are break-even points, of course. When sending a 40-passenger bus out with 3 paying customers, just your gas mileage cost will kill you. And the drivers salary will still be the same. The best would be to have a variety of bus sizes available, and send out the appropriately sized one. But that means a larger investment in an inventory of buses, many of which sit unused at any time. Plus extra costs in maintaining more & different sizes of buses. And a major scheduling problem, in trying to keep the right sizes at the locations where they will be needed next.
Many, many years ago ('96 I think), I went to Monterrey (Mexico) with a gringo friend who lived in Austin. I flied to Austin, we drove to the border, crossed it on foot and took a bus.
He was amazed at the bus. It wasn’t older than we were, you couldn’t count every spring in the seat and the movies shown were either in Spanish with English subtitles or viceversa. To me, that was a normal bus… the Greyhounds I took in '98 would probably not be able to pass Spain’s “compulsory yearly checkups”.
Spanish intercity bus lines are designed specifically to complement the trains. Say that there are (cheap, unlike Amtrak) trains from A to B at 7:00, 8:00, 13:15, 17:45 and 21:30 - gee, how strange, there are buses from A to B at 9:30, 12:00, 15:20 and 18:30!
But both trains and buses are taken either by people who can’t drive or when it’s more comfortable to do so than to drive. Sometimes, when it’s a lot cheaper. So, in order to have people use public transportation:
it’s got to be cheaper than driving/flying the same route and
Doubtful. It’s a bit like why there are no luxury ocean liners these days, only cruise ships. I can fly Sydney to Melbourne for $100 and get there in an hour and a half. I can go by cheap and nasty bus for half of that price but it’ll take me twelve hours and I’ll get out feeling like I’ve done five rounds with Mike Tyson. To provide first or business class bus service, it’d probably mean minimum $100 but probably more, and it’d still take twelve hours. Travellers with $100 will fly economy. Travellers with $400 will fly business or first.
There is a company providing service between NYC and Boston via luxury bus, which has 2 seats on one side, a single seat on the other, with tray tables, electric and wireless internet in each row, along with a table seating area in the back.
One way bus lines could do better might be to focus on short- and mid-haul routes where the efficacy of flying is cancelled out by factors such as the distance of the airports from wherever people actually want to go, and the hassles of airport security. Unfortunately, the roads between places like that tend to be crowded just as airplanes do.
I’m always interested to notice in movies from the 1950s and 60s that it seemed to be the height of bus travel; almost any time somebody went somewhere–especially kids and college students–they’d be riding the dog. It seems this was a brief golden age from the point of view of bus companies, when they benefited from postwar prosperity, new highways were being built, but most families still had only one car if any. Add to that the fact that rail passenger routes were dying off and you had a positive perfect storm from the bus companies’ perspective.
Greyhound does this after a fashion. If too many people show up at the terminal, expecting travel on a particular route, they will send out two buses instead of one. But the catch is that there has to be an extra bus available for that purpose.
If you look through American magazine ads of the 1950s and 1960s, you’ll see that bus companies were experimenting with such things, and the ads advertise the comfort (!) of bus travel, presumably in contrast to driving.
Interesting. I was actually going to mention that my officemate, who is a Vietnamese immigrant told me about a bus line that makes runs between L.A. and the Bay Area, that most Anglos don’t know about, but which is very popular in the Asian communities. It would seem that bus travel above and beyond the barebones Greyhound is a collection of niche markets.
Occasionally my company puts us all aboard buses* so we can ride out to a hall that’s big enough for the president to give a state of the company address. These are comfortable tourist buses, immaculately clean, and bright and colorful inside. I always think, “This wouldn’t be such a bad way to travel!”, at least if I didn’t want to fly or drive. But from what I understand, Greyhound not so much.
*Or sometimes they just broadcast it over a private TV channel. We are, after all, a TV company.
I think the best niche market is the overnight service, for destinations more than couple hours drive away but not far enough for a red-eye flight. I’ve taken such buses in Japan many times; even though Japan has an excellent rail network and decent airlines, the overnight bus was sometimes the most convenient way to travel. (And always the cheapest.)
But the real problem in the US is: for most destinations, once you get to the destination you need a car to get around. There’s no easy solution to that. You could have a rental car company at the bus terminal, but still the added cost of the rental car makes the bus less attractive.
This always comes up when discussing intercity bus or train service, and I understand the problem – but what makes it not a problem for airlines?
Rental company at the airport, sure, but buses or trains could easily enough do that, and have the added advantage of being able to locate closer to a city’s center (buses moreso). So what are airlines doing?
Many if not most of the 1st class buses are pretty new. Many of the premier class buses are new Volvos or Mercedes. One line I’m familiar with, ETN offers large new buses with seats for only 25 passenegers so you have plenty of leg room.
This one is simple. Planes are fast and the U.S. is vast. Most people don’t have much choice if they want to travel from Boston to Dallas or Chicago to San Francisco for a 1 week trip. Planes have little competition for those purposes even if you have to rent a car once you get there.
However, people that rent cars usually have access to a car of their own and a private car is usually undefeatable competition to busses for most purposes. Our interstate highway system usually makes cars faster, more flexible, and more convenient than busses. Busses have most of the drawbacks of trains and few of the (limited) advantages.
In short, the only people that would routinely take a bus are the poor, the elderly, the infirm, or students.
People do not have the time in a 4-day weekend to spend 16-24 hrs traveling to and from their destination. Consequently, intercity bus lines loose potential customers who might otherwise find the low prices appealing. Unfortunately, even the traditionally low prices have proven to be inconsistent at best. Initially, I fully intended on taking the bus or train home for winter break this year. When I looked up the prices, however, I found that the plane was going to cost me $5 more than the bus after taxes. There is no way that you can get me to choose an 8-hour trip over a 50-minute flight when there is only a $5 difference.
The price factor is key because consistent prices, along with quality service, help to establish a more stable customer base. Flights from my college to home are consistently within $10 of the $110 range. Train tickets vary from $15 each way through rail sale, up to $150 round trip. That range is so wide that I rarely rely on Amtrak as a travel option. The bus used to only cost $40-$60 but now, the lowest price that I have seen recently has been $90. These variances in pricing have caused me to check the prices of plane tickets first. If they are under $100, I will buy the plane ticket instead of stalking the Greyhound site and waiting for the price to change. For last minute travel plans, I will pay up to $120 for a flight that will maximize my destination time.
Time is another factor in selecting the best method of transportation. Bus travel time between Pittsburgh and New York City are listed as varying between 7 and 13 hours. All of the college students in Pittsburgh that are from the NYC area know that there is only one bus that consistently arrives in 7 hours or less and that is the 130 AM bus. Out of twelve possible options, there is only one bus with a travel time that is comparable to that of a car.
I’m all for smaller buses. When I lived in Escondido California all the buses were 20-seaters.
And they went up and down the main strip from the housing area to the interstate freeway every 20 minutes. Free for seniors and students, so they needed no special services for them, and the school pitched in the savings on special buses.
And it was perfect. Commuters at 7 am, kids at 8, seniors and shoppers starting at 9 when the stores started to open, … on to teens catching the last bus home after the last movie ended.
Even if a bus had only a few riders on any one trip, it was nowhere near the loss as if it had been a huge bus. And with frequent schedules, you could count on getting the next bus and not being at work too late.
But most people have plenty of destinations within range of an overnight bus. If you accept 9pm-7am as overnight, you can travel, what, 400 miles or so? If I could work all day Friday, hop on a bus and be in Pensacola Beach or New Orleans by Saturday morning, I’d definitely do it. The alternative is to drive all night by myself, or leave in the morning and get there late Saturday afternoon.
This thread is about inter-city buses. Sounds like you’re talking about commuter buses?
I would suppose the large cities of California and the Northeast (Boston-NYC was mentioned) would work best. There is some probably some ideal distance for buses. Maybe a four to six hour drive.
If I want to go from St. Louis to Kansas City or Chicago, I can drive, fly, take the bus or the train. The bus has no advantage over driving or flying, and only a slight price advantage over the train.
However, my son goes to school in Kirksville, Missouri. One train a day stops at a station 10 miles away and there are two horribly overpriced flights there, five days a week. A town full of college kids 100-200 miles away from any major city, with almost no transportation options. Sounds like an ideal place for bus service.
Wrong. There is no bus service to Kirksville, Warrenton, Maryville or any other small or mid-size city in Missouri, even those with a pool of college kids. Greyhound decided that those routes can’t be profitable, even with a captive audience. And since no other operator has stepped in to fill the gap, I guess they’re right.
If bus companies can’t succeed in a market like that, they can’t succeed anywhere.
I would love to take an overnight bus trip someplace if the price was right. The last time I checked though from here to my destination the bus was $112 and the plane was $145. For such a small difference in price I am certianly going to take the much faster trip! If the bus had been $50 or $60 I wouldn’t have thought twice about taking the red eye bus and ending up where I needed to be a couple of hours later. Considering the options available to travelers the cost of a bus trip isn’t worth it.
We have that here in Alberta as well: see this link. The seats are as you describe (two and one), a galley with complimentary snacks and hot and cold drinks, 110VAC outlets, Internet service on most of the fleet, a selection of current magazines and newspapers, movies… Overall, a nice trip. Reasonable on cost as well, which is important to me as I travel between Calgary and Edmonton fairly frequently. That’s usually a three-hour trip, if you were wondering.