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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing you're listing here requires a heavily subsidized regional airport, just a regional airfield ...

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.

> 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

It’s a choice to enable that situation, not an intrinsic factor. Bus terminals in South America are pretty nice.

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 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).