It's amazing how something that should be a public utility has been carved up by private equity and sold to a foreign company. Greyhound has completely stopped operating in Canada and the impact has been tremendous.
It's interesting how airports, especially regional airports, are often heavily subsidised in the US. But bus terminals, apparantely, are something that the private sector should provide without government support. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Yes, but also airlines will completely fail without government support. The only aspect of aviation that is private is the buying a ticket and purchasing and operating planes, creating a thin fiction of a free market. Everything else is supported. The airports, the airline manufacturers (that also make expensive weapon systems via govt. contracts), the fuel system (supported by endless diplomacy, monetary policy, and war), radar and satellite networks, subsidies when revenue can't support operations.... it goes on and on.
The airlines are critical to a big country like the US when our passenger rail networks are so slow, so the government supports it. They should also support bus networks etc. I suspect much of their road policy is designed to support Americans buying cars, the second biggest purchase next to a house that most people buy. It's very cynical.
The airline industry seems to work everywhere in the world regardless of the subsidy situation so I doubt it'd fail without support. A lot of subsidies seem to come from regions competing with each other eg. subsidise Boeing so the jobs don't move to Airbus/Europe, expand London airports so they don't switch to Paris etc.
Airlines are subsidized all around the world, and incinerate money everywhere. Very few airlines are profitable over even short periods. In the US, Southwest is the only one whose shareholder equity's grown in the last 5, 10, 20 or how many years you want.
> The airlines are critical to a big country like the US when our passenger rail networks are so slow, so the government supports it.
How does this follow? If they're critical and highly subsidized, that implies the value that people get out of tickets is much higher than what they're paying, so people should be willing to pay much higher prices if subsidies are ended.
They are critical because of the lack of practical alternative means. There is no train rail system that reach the same level of coverage. Even if you forget about the price and time, there isn't a usually route using rail system for most A-B points.
Buses already rely on private car drivers subsidising them via road damage. Bus can do 10,000-20,000 times more damage. Extrapolate that and it’s actually cheaper to be in a taxi.
I wonder if that's true. With the volume of taxis necessary to replace busses, you have to think about the increased fuel and maintenance costs, the increased costs related directly to traffic, and indirectly in the form of losses from accidents, etc.
There's no reason buses need to be terrible. Intercity bus service in Mexico is practically luxurious, with big reclining seats that you can actually sleep in and thick curtains that close. In the U.S., there was a startup offering overnight trips between Los Angeles and San Francisco with sleeping pods. They shut down at the beginning of the pandemic, but imagine how nice it would be to wake up at your destination refreshed instead of fighting through LAX at dawn and squeezing into a 737 for one of those "cheap" flights.
I often take Amtrak from Portland to Seattle instead of flying. Theoretically it is a short flight vs a four hour train trip, but consider that the train station is centrally located on both ends, and you can enjoy the decadent spaciousness of even a coach seat on Amtrak, while breathing nice fresh sea level air the entire time, and Amtrak wins easily.
> but imagine how nice it would be to wake up at your destination refreshed instead of fighting through LAX at dawn and squeezing into a 737 for one of those "cheap" flights.
I generally have bad sleeps when I’m staying in a luxurious bed at the Marriott or Hyatt. I cannot imagine that spending a night in something called a sleeping pod would end in anything other than me being up all night unable to sleep.
I think regional airports are great, but I don’t think they can meaningfully compete with intercity coaches. It will never be financially viable to price a commercial flight on a small aircraft at the sub $30 point. I also don’t think the interchange network can possibly have the same level of coverage.
It needs to be possible for people to use public transport to get around, including between smaller destinations, otherwise you’re just completely abandoning the population who can’t drive.
The majority of Americans didn't fly anywhere last year and I'm not sure they would agree with your assessment. This is a case where more democracy — putting region airports on ballots — makes a lot of sense. If the majority of people vote for it, then by all means, subsidize it.
There is a reason why republican government is more effective than a pure democracy.
We have plenty of examples of populist idiocy. Many folks never fly - I’ve actually only ridden an airplane 8 times. But the overall benefit to society is compelling and beneficial to society.
Sports stadiums can be similar, but modern clubs want facilities who luxury features exceeds what the government should provide.
EVs aren’t wasteful. The US alone consumes 9 million gallons of gas a day. It’s not sustainable. If we don’t transition in the next fifty years no one will be driving except for the extraordinarily wealthy.
Oil is made over millions of years and we’re on track to deplete it in under 200 years. We’ll never completely deplete it because the oil that’s left will be uneconomical to extract, but that’s functionally the same thing.
Downvoted this because it's basically just a bunch of off-topic political talking points. They bring nothing relevant to the comment you're replying to.
This so much. Anyone who has ever spent time having to be stuck at a Greyhound terminal in the south knows what true hell looks like. They are full of the sketchiest people of every city.
Not great places unless you are into smoking crack with homeless people and getting threatened or stabbed by them.
> They are full of the sketchiest people of every city.
Partly because the bus station opened up in the 50s and remains in the sketchiest part of the city. There was rarely any real motivation to move them.
I used to take the bus several times a year between LA and Carson City NV. A 12 hour bus ride that would take me from scenic downtown LA and eventually drop me off in Carson City at a closed bus station at 5 in the morning. The driver was able to sell tickets to folks that were just standing by the highway at designated stops in the middle of the desert on the way up. We used to stop in Mojave for dinner at the cafe next to the bus shack^H^H^H^H^Hstation. I'd pick up cool Space Shuttle on 747 postcards while I was there.
Overall the folks weren't too awful on that bus, but it surely made for a long night.
Outside of the US, this is usually addressed by having a dedicated police unit residing at a station. Everything is pretty calm and civil after that. The fact that it's not the case in the US does not mean that it's inevitable to have such unsafe stations.
This so much. Anyone who has ever spent time having to be stuck at a Greyhound terminal in the south knows what true hell looks like. They are full of the sketchiest people of every city.
It's not the worst (i.e. a southern bus station), some parts of Chicago are the worst. It's just a god awful shitshow. I had a blast when I did it, yes there were crackheads, but you can make new friends with crackheads. There was a 'hood lady I made friends with and a sweet old foreigner grandma type visiting her kid... who didn't speak english.. so I helped her get there what with the 8 hour bus delay, which might be related to stations shutting down
Making the bus more useful for more people has the opposite effect. The people who are currently on the bus are people with no other option. The population on the bus, on average, is only going to get less "undesirable" (to the HN crowd) if the bus station is nice, well-lit, comes at reasonable times, has coffee shops and stuff.
Thank you for saying this, I was hoping somebody would bring class into it. Intercity bus lines aren’t subsidized because poor people ride buses between cities, and as a society we prefer not to subsidize poor people’s physical mobility. Physical mobility is a prerequisite for social mobility, after all.
I suspect you are not aligned with me. I am saying that lower-class people, on average, have behavior that middle-class people don't want to be exposed to. Look at some of the stories in this thread.
I’ve been my share of 15 hour bus rides. Greyhound. Megabus. Changing buses downtown at midnight. Mostly it’s just people trying to get around. Worst that ever happened is I got scammed out of $20 when I was a kid and I’d never heard “I’m trying to get back to Virginia but I’m $31 short” before. I mean sure, there might be a junkie taking way too long in the bathroom, but people intent on doing you actual harm are pretty thin on the ground.
That's not good enough. It needs to be 99%. Look at the other stories in this thread. Even 5% is enough to avoid it.
Moreover, you come across as someone driven by ideology rather than honesty. You jumped straight into a cliched talking point about how the man is maliciously trying to keep poor people down.
> Look at the other stories in this thread. Even 5% is enough to avoid it.
A lot of them sound like: "Ick, I saw poor people, never again will I subject myself to that. I now restrict myself to modes of transport too expensive for those poors to use."
> The threat of a closure has reached a stress point in Chicago because Greyhound, the largest intercity carrier in the United States, no longer owns its terminals in the city and dozens of others. Greyhound, owned by German company Flix Mobility (which also owns FlixBus), has sold its terminals to investors for lucrative redevelopment in recent years, including dozens to investment firm Alden Global Capital. Alden is best known for buying up local newspapers like The Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and The Baltimore Sun, cutting staff, and selling some of their downtown buildings.
There was a point in my life where I rode Greyhound and Megabus to save money. There's already very little dignity to be found in long-distance bus travel, and removing facilities where people can rest during layovers just drives what little remains completely into the dirt. But hey, it may be unraveling the fabric of society, but at least we increased shareholder value.
Is there some rule that CTA can’t have a station in a building with a bar? Because most of the loop subway stations skirt that pretty close.
There is a bar in the pedway between the lake redline stop and the Washington blue line stop for instance. And the merchandise mart has several bars and a brown line stop.
I’d guess that the CTA doesn’t have a presence at Union Station because of the way we carved up regional transit, not because of done alcohol policy.
I don't know about CTA, but Greyhound absolutely will not tolerate it.
I can either use Trailways or a two hour drive to Aurora Metra from where I live (I've grown to prefer Aurora). When Trailways stops at the Napierville Metra, the driver commonly says that anyone who enters the bar at the station will not reboard the bus.
Aurora is also absolutely superior when I need to use O'Hare.
That also doesn’t account for the CTA Union Transit center which is a bus terminus across the street from Union Station (and next to an outdoor pavilion with 2 bars).
> and removing facilities where people can rest during layovers just drives what little remains completely into the dirt.
To be clear the bigger problem is that Greyhound will have to cut service in Chicago dramatically - they really need a terminal to support larger operations, they can’t have dozens of buses sitting in the road. There will be a few routes that dump people on the street, but companies like Megabus will probably cut service entirely.
Flixbus/Greyhound will do as they have done in other cities, and rent a large parking lot, plop a trailer house and a few port-a-potties and call it a station.
Hah, I'm amazed FlixBus got that big. Their original model is Uber but for buses, i.e. sell tickets for bus rides, and instead of owning buses, they pay bus companies to drive the routes for them (also having their buses be covered in their corporate vinyl wrap).
Somewhat relatedly, I was in London several years ago, and their buses had a logo that said "Arriva - a DB [Deutsche Bahn] company". I found it funny that the Germans managed to "rule" over England (well, London - well, their bus network) after all.
> Alden is best known for buying up local newspapers like The Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and The Baltimore Sun, cutting staff, and selling some of their downtown buildings.
How does that work?
I mean... were the companies sold for less than the realestate was worth?
Generally, you split the company and the real estate. Then you force the company pay rent on the real estate. Then you jack the rental rates to extract the cash out of the company. Then you put the company into bankruptcy. Then you walk off with the real estate.
Anything with old real estate is subject to this. Massachusetts had a similar issue with selling off a bunch of the old Catholic hospitals. The company bought the hospitals, extracted the real estate, and now they're closing all the hospitals. Oops.
I’m glad for this, bus companies have been fighting train development for decades to prop up their garbage service. Hopefully if they get broken up and sold for parts we can have sensible public transit in this country which doesn’t rely on roads and sitting in traffic.
