bdndndndbve
16 hours ago
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.
Reason077
16 hours ago
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?
tehjoker
15 hours ago
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.
tim333
4 hours ago
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.
Marsymars
15 hours ago
> 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.
elashri
15 hours ago
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.
dzhiurgis
12 hours ago
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.
bmsan
11 hours ago
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.
briandear
16 hours ago
Buses are terrible. Nobody wants to spent 15 hours on a Greyhound when there are cheap and easy flights.
Regional airports are subsidized for good reason. Air ambulances, search and rescue, firefighting, disaster relief, and all sorts of public service work happens at regional airports. Nobody is sending organs for transplant via Greyhound. You’re not going to stage firefighting aircraft at SFO. You’re also not going to train student pilots at LAX.
Let’s not forget Watsonville California during the 1989 earthquake. https://youtu.be/qxCCcLUYP7Y?feature=shared
I used to fly disaster and public service relief flights — into Louisiana after a major hurricane — roads were flooded and impassible; but my Cessna T206 could get in bringing supplies — despite the New Orleans Airport being shut down for two days.
I’ve also flown countless Angel Flight missions, Pilots and Paws, and various support missions during the 2020 California wildfires. All using regional airports.
When governments stop paying for sports stadiums, sending money to pay for someone else’s wars, and subsidizing housing for people that are in the country illegally, EVs, and every other wasteful bit of government spending — then perhaps we might talk about regional airports.
The money the U.S. sent to Ukraine in just a single year could fund regional airports for decades. Eliminating waste fraud and abuse in the Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security system would fund regional airports for a lifetime.
chrchr
15 hours ago
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.
noodlesUK
15 hours ago
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.
undersuit
15 hours ago
But I might want to spend 4 hours on a bus and I can't now. I have to take 2 1.5 hour flights thanks to the Delta hub.
mcone
15 hours ago
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.
Spooky23
15 hours ago
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.
linotype
15 hours ago
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.
yaksha
15 hours ago
Do you have references backing up the claim of such gas consumption not being sustainable?
linotype
15 hours ago
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
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.
baggy_trough
15 hours ago
They said the same “50 years to go” thing in the 70s. Yes, of course the naturally occurring supply is finite. But we don’t know where the limit is.
user
15 hours ago
gambiting
15 hours ago
What do you mean? You do know our oil supplies are finite, right?
user
15 hours ago
user
15 hours ago
user
15 hours ago
tobi1449
14 hours ago
Nothing you're listing here requires a heavily subsidized regional airport, just a regional airfield ...
bachmeier
15 hours ago
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.
senkora
15 hours ago
Well, to be fair, someone did get eaten on a Greyhound in Canada: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tim_McLean
searealist
16 hours ago
People don't use greyhound because of the other people who use greyhound. Making this a public utility only worsens this problem.
edm0nd
16 hours ago
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.
whartung
15 hours ago
> 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.
krasin
15 hours ago
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.
amy-petrik-214
11 hours ago
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
mixmastamyk
15 hours ago
It’s a choice to enable that situation, not an intrinsic factor. Bus terminals in South America are pretty nice.
oldnetguy
15 hours ago
Took a bus to Atlantic City, people played music and smoked in the bus.
If no one drives me, I will never go back.
sevensor
15 hours ago
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.
searealist
15 hours ago
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.
sevensor
14 hours ago
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.
searealist
12 hours ago
> Mostly it’s just people trying to get around
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.
sevensor
11 hours ago
> 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.
That’s a pretty high standard considering the behavior of highway drivers. How do you get around, friend?
searealist
10 hours ago
It's the standard I meet by flying any airline except Frontier or Spirit.
tivert
9 hours ago
> 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."
searealist
8 hours ago
blasting music, smoking drugs, feeling unsafe...