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.
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."