Coaches and Buses

In the UK they don't call intercity buses buses, they call them coaches, which is a really useful term of distinction I'm going to adopt here. And in the US, coaches (most famously Greyhound) are still the main way to get from city to city without a car, because our train infrastructure has regressed to second childishness and mere oblivion.

Our intercity coaches aren't that great either, but they're a lot more extensive.

Now, I usually talk here about city-by-city issues, but I have had times in my life where coach service between cities was vital to my ability to move around, and I have some thoughts on what it means to have good coach service between two cities or in a region. 

1. More Than One Carrier or Option

I realize that many of the lines highlighted in the link above are state-sponsored routes that exist because the state pays or subsidizes a carrier to provide service. And that's a vital lifeline for many communities, don't get me wrong! But good service almost inherently has to come from some competition. I say this not necessarily in a capitalist way, but in the sense that if there is no pressure of competing schedules, prices, or amenities, in my experience service gets cut back to the absolute minimum for, well, capitalist reasons. Hence the need for state subsidy in so many cases.

This doesn't have to be super-robust: the picture above is from the bus depot where I caught a Burlington Trailways route, and Greyhound serves the same route, but they each sell tickets on the other's service. That means it's really more coopetition, where two services combine to make one effective service without either of them having to fully commit. But it still improves the service relative to a single carrier doing the least they can.

2. Variety in Times

Related to the above, a key element in a good coach service is that you need variety of times: if you have what is fundamentally a commuter service, or worse yet (but commonly) a morning-only or evening-only service, you don't have a real connection, because you don't have the flexibility to allow people to travel when they want.

On the other hand of course are those coach services that might as well be buses: some like the Chinatown buses between NYC and Boston are just high-frequency intercity routes, and others, like the below bus in Indiana, are kind of somewhere between bus and coach by connecting smaller cities that are close together (but still notably distinct) in a time-consuming but bus-frequency manner.

This guy is a technically connecting two cities! You might call him a bus because of his frequency and the shorter distance compared to say QC-Chicago, but he's still out there doing it! And an ideal coach service should be so frequent that you can assume it'll be available roughly when you want it.

3. Integration

A good intercity coach route should integrate with more local transit on either side (which of course is where the above Indianian bus falls down because it is the only local transit). I used to take the coach between Oxford and London often, and while I didn't really take the bus after on the Oxford side because it was so walkable, in London we came into Victoria, a major rail and bus hub, so everything was easy to get to from there.

When intercity coaches come into the Milwaukee Intermodal Station, they get the local bus, the Amtrak station, and the streetcar all in one. That's good integration. The coaches in Davenport share the station with local buses. And then you have Chicago, where the Greyhound station sits in a terribly-integrated area of near-downtown, which you'd really have to work hard to make as close in with as bad transit connections as it has.

Oh well.

So yes, intercity coach routes matter a lot for a lot of people--and just like other transit, connecting them to other things, making them run frequently, and having multiple routes to get somewhere in a robust network make them better. It's almost like there are consistent principles for good transit, or something...