> "As Greyhound terminals close, transit advocates say the public sector needs to step in to play a larger role in supporting intercity bus travel."
I wish the article would cite the transit advocates that are in favor of this.
I wish the article would cite the transit advocates that are in favor of this.
(I consider myself a transit advocate, but I'm not sure if I'll write up my thoughts: that would take a lot of time/effort to put into words. In any case you didn't ask that question)
The solution for intercity transit is obviously trains and aircraft. The primary disadvantage of intra-city trains is the expense of building a rail line to less traveled parts of a city, but nearly every city already has at least one intercity rail line.
The reason intercity passenger trains aren't more popular is that Amtrak charges almost as much as a plane ticket costs but then gets you there much slower. Which is in part caused by low ridership, which subsidies for intercity buses would only make worse.
Many of the existing freight rail lines aren't suitable for passenger use even if there was demand to support them, and even if they were the are still tons of town with no rail passing through them. Using the highways we've already built and are going to maintain either way is more efficient than building out completely different infrastructures for public transit and personal transportation.
The problem here isn't intercity transit, it's intra-city transit. But that isn't the one Greyhound solves.
Low ridership is also the reason many cities with tracks don't have passenger routes.
No it really doesn't, and even if it passes through a region, the routes are often pathological, like in the worst case a trip from Denver to Dallas having to pass through Chicago or San Francisco.
> If the station on the other end is five minutes drive or fifteen minutes doesn't really matter, because it's too far to walk either way.
That is very minor problem compared to the issue of the nearest Amtrak stop being literally hundreds of miles further away compared to the nearest greyhound stop.
> Low ridership is also the reason many cities with tracks don't have passenger routes.
There are other reasons, in particular that running freight and passenger trains on the same rails has many scheduling issues that makes the rails worse for both users.
The west is why it's "most" rather than "all" regions. But the places Amtrak doesn't go are the same places where local mass transit is abysmal or non-existent and everybody has a car. The reason there is no direct passenger route from Denver to Dallas is that anybody going there would drive or -- because everything is so spread out in the west and that's still a 12 hour drive -- fly.
> That is very minor problem compared to the issue of the nearest Amtrak stop being literally hundreds of miles further away compared to the nearest greyhound stop.
But it usually isn't, especially anywhere that anybody would be using either of these modes of transport.
Okay, so Greyhound goes to Daytona Beach and Amtrak "only" goes to DeLand, but they're <25 miles apart, and your destination may be some other town in the region rather than one where either of them have a stop.
> There are other reasons, in particular that running freight and passenger trains on the same rails has many scheduling issues that makes the rails worse for both users.
It's all down to ridership. If more people used them then you could justify more sections of parallel track that allow trains to pass each other or travel in opposite directions at the same time.
Not just the west. I live in Jacksonville, FL, an 8 hour drive to New Orleans, and just 6 to Atlanta, but I'd need to go through Washington DC to get to Atlanta or through Chicago if I wanted to get to New Orleans (on a train the whole way).
Rail across the US doesn't not make sense. Even North South the US is too big for rail to make sense. However there are a lot of shorter trips that would make sense via rail if the network existed and had competent operations. That Amtrak only makes money on the Boston-DC routes (or so they claim) more about their bad management and decades of bad decisions to not invest in making anything else worth using.
For example, the Cleveland and Pittsburgh metro areas are over 2 million and just over 3 hours apart by train or car. However, there is currently only one train from Cleveland to Pittsburgh a day, and it leaves at 1:54 AM. Obviously, most people will drive if that's the only alternative, but that does not say much about the general viability of inter-urban rail between those two cities.
There are good discussions about Amtrak routes and the most recently-planned Amtrak expansions here: 1. https://humantransit.org/2023/07/amtraks-endless-ridership-c... 2. https://humantransit.org/2023/08/amtraks-long-distance-train...
It’s possible that other viable routes exist, but unfortunately the political environment makes some of them impossible to build. For example, a French railroad operator working on the California high speed rail project bailed out in 2011 due to “political dysfunction”, instead building a high speed rail line in Morocco that finished in seven years. So in some theoretical alternate universe where California was as politically functional as Morocco, maybe they could have a modern bullet train between LA and SF. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen though.
Personally I’m happy to leave the question to private investors. I wouldn’t put any money in your proposed Cleveland-Pittsburgh line but maybe you can prove me wrong. I am also dubious that Texas would be a good candidate for passenger rail; Texas has very good highway coverage and the way Texas cities are laid out, you’d need to rent a car on either end of your train journey anyway so it really makes more sense to drive.
You have all sorts of private inter-city bus services (megabus, boltbus, etc. and of course the Chinatown buses that have connected Chinatowns across the country for decades) that work pretty well to keep costs down and are pretty efficient.
The government can step in to require certain minimum labor protections and safety and maintenance standards, but I don't think there's much need for govts to actually run inter-city buses.
In larger cities with a lot of buses governments should create an open bus depot where all the different private operators can rent gates (much like an airport), so there's a centralized location where services such as food, drinks, taxi services, public transport, etc., but this could very easily be a profitable venture that would not require govt. support (other than requiring inter-city buses to use the depot).
I'd rather have govt support other inter-city services where it currently does not put much investment in, such as rail.