intercity bus service crisis; Greyhound station closures nationwide
I try to keep on top of stuff like this. I feel really bad that this snuck up on me. It’s really important. I myself have been an extensive user of Greyhound. Just had not ridden in the past several years since Covid started.
I usually only take one long-distance trip a year, to see my family several states away, and it is typically been by train for the past few years rather than bus. (I no longer fly, for many reasons. I signed a no-fly pledge a few years back.) This past fall, I decided to look into Greyhound bus again for the first time in a awhile.
By chance, I happened to notice that the station in St Augustine had closed down. That didn’t affect what would have been my ticket, but it gave me pause. (I ended up using Amtrak, my other usual travel mode, for my trip.)
I forgot about it until recently, when I was checking into interstate transit options just for future reference. I looked into Greyhound, and I noticed that many of the results that popped up for my home station, Daytona Beach, gave me results instead for a neighboring city about 20 miles away. And that the company name Flix bus kept popping up.
I was busy with stuff and didn’t think until this evening to look to see if this might be part of a pattern.
Looking back, I remember a trip I took by greyhound some years ago, I think it might’ve been a couple years before Covid started.
I remember that one of the layover stations, a city in the Carolinas which I was looking forward to because the bus driver told us we would like the food there, turned out to be this new building out of the city center, far from any services. There were no stores or anything we could walk to, or find any food. I heard later that it was because some university had bought up the land that the downtown stop used to be on.
”A closure in Chicago would accelerate the crisis in intercity bus service in the United States. Intercity buses carry an estimated 60 million people annually — twice the number of people who take Amtrak every year — but companies have cut service and closed terminals in recent decades. Cities lost nearly one-third of intercity bus service between 1960 and 1980 and more than half of the remaining service between 1980 and 2006, according to Chaddick Institute research.”
Ugh. Now I’m off to go look for an update to see if the Chicago terminal ended up getting saved.
It sounds like a lot of it is driven by high real estate values in downtown areas, coupled with the privatization trends in USA life.
Also, how did a foreign company (Flix is a German company) come to own our major nationwide bus service? To me, bus service is public infrastructure. Seems like it would be a bad idea to sell it to foreign investors.
The article linked above does have a spot of good news:
“One promising model is in Atlanta, where Greyhound opened a new 14,000 square-foot dedicated terminal this year with financial support from the state and federal governments. The station is used by other intercity bus operators and is near public transit.”
So: financial support from state and federal governments; and proximity to city public transit; and shared use with other intercity bus operators. Sounds like a good formula.
From what I can tell so far, Greyhound service in Chicago is safe for now. Very important, because it is a massive transfer point serving millions of passengers, a large percentage of them people with low incomes For whom this is the best or only travel option.
* For numerous reasons, I have come to deeply loathe the airline industry. For more information about no-fly pledge, and how people are living full happy lives without getting on airplanes, check out Flight-Free USA, Flight-Free UK.