Highway Trains from LA to San Francisco

A company called Cabin is offering overnight bus service with “private sleeping cabins” between San Francisco and Los Angeles for $115. The service currently operates about three times a week but in September will begin operating daily. Buses leave at 11 pm and arrive at 7 am from near the Embarcadero in San Francisco and next to the beach in Santa Monica.

Photo courtesy Cabin.

The double-decker buses have 24 sleeping compartments with 25-inch-by-75-inch memory foam beds and bedding, 25 inches of head room, a privacy curtain, a small window with a shade, a reading lamp, power ports, wifi, earplugs, and melatonin to help people sleep. The buses also have a small lounge where people who are not ready to sleep or who wake up early can talk and get espresso, tea, and water from an on-board attendant. The one-way fare is $115.

Cabin sees this service as an answer to the problem that trips of 500 miles can take as much business time as coast-to-coast trips. If the service is successful, the company will consider adding runs from San Francisco to Portland and Los Angeles to Las Vegas. In the long run, company founders Gaetano Crupi and Tom Currier speculate that we’ll see “highway trains” of driverless buses, perhaps following in a platoon behind one lead bus with a driver.

These buses remind me of Columbia Nite Coaches, eighteen of which were built in 1934 to help the infant bus industry offer overnight service similar to the railroads. The Nite Coaches had five separate rooms with seats that made up into 25 beds. Pacific Greyhound, which was then partly owned by Southern Pacific, bought ten of them to use in San Francisco-Los Angeles and Oakland-Portland service, charging fares of less than $5, or about $80 in today’s money. The service was apparently not a success as there were few repeat orders for Nite Coaches and all of them were scrapped by the mid 1950s.

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Today, Amtrak has just one train a day on this route, which takes about 12 hours from Oakland to Los Angeles. Traveling in daylight hours (and passing some of the most beautiful scenery in the entire Amtrak system), coach fare starts at $51 but, if you buy at the last minute, can go as high as $124. If it were an overnight train, a sleeping room would cost at least $178.

Megabus offers six buses a day that take about 7-1/2 hours, including one that directly competes with Cabin. Fares start at $1.50 and go as high as $53.50.

Southwest Airlines has more than 100 non-stop flights a day between the San Francisco Bay Area’s three main airports and Los Angeles’ five airports. Currently, fares on most of those flights start at $49 with an advance purchase; most other airlines have fares starting around $97. Air travel time is typically about 80 minutes, but disgruntled travelers will point out that when time is added to get to and from airports and getting through security, the total trip can take several hours. On the other hand, the choice of multiple airports mean that many travelers are likely to be closer to a Southwest terminal than a Cabin terminal and early morning or evening flights can avoid losing business hours.

Based on these fares, I’d say Cabin is a bit overpriced. But Limoliner is offering three trips a day between Boston and New York (half the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles) for $89 in buses with 22 first-class seats, so $115 for an overnight bus may be reasonable for many people.

A woman who went on Cabin’s inaugural trip is certainly enthusiastic. “Flying means I have to get to the airport at least an hour early, and deal with security lines and potential delays due to weather or some other nonsense,” says Megan Rose Dickey. “Driving means I have to be awake in the car for several hours and even if I’m a passenger, I can’t fully stretch out my legs. With Cabin, I can board up to 10 minutes before the bus departs and pass out on a real, albeit small, bed.” If Cabin is successful, it takes away one more reason people give for why we have to subsidize Amtrak.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

7 Responses to Highway Trains from LA to San Francisco

  1. Sandy Teal says:

    The advantage of an overnight travel is that it saves the cost of a hotel room in LA or SF, which would tend to be pricy themselves.

  2. Frank says:

    It doesn’t save the cost of a hotel room.

    If one takes anearly flight for $49, one gets an entire day in their destination city. Still will have to stay at a hotel that night. By going overnight on a bus, one pays $65 more. Still get the next day in the city and still have to get a hotel that night.

  3. NoDakNative says:

    For general bus travel I would much rather be laying down anyway. Sitting that long isn’t comfortable.

    If this works, you could have “economy cots” with less headroom to fit more people. If you are gonna be asleep anyway, and the price is right, who cares if you only have enough space to roll over. Claustrophobia could be solved by adding windows to the outside of the bus.

  4. the highwayman says:

    For starters roads are not expected to be profitable to survive.

    The ideal thing to do would be to couple a freight train behind a passenger train, which would further reduce costs

  5. NoDakNative says:

    “The ideal thing to do would be to couple a freight train behind a passenger train, which would further reduce costs.”

    Well I can tell who doesn’t have a clue on how freight rail operates and who thinks such an idea is remotely feasible.

    You don’t just slap cars willy nilly onto the end of a train.

  6. prk166 says:


    The ideal thing to do would be to couple a freight train behind a passenger train, which would further reduce costs
    ” ~Highwayman

    I’m not sure what ditch weed you’ve put in your brownies but that mixed arrangement was rarely profitable during the golden age of passenger rail travel 100 years ago. And that was a 100 years ago.

    How would UP make money throwing some labor intensive passenger cars on the back of a MWCRV taking 18 hours to get from LA to Sacramento, adding to congestion of the already clogged Tehachapi and do enough volume to to make it pay? How do they compete with $25 8 hour bus rides or $100 round trip for a 90 minute flight? A single loaded hopper generates as much revenue as a handful of passenger cars would in a week.

  7. the highwayman says:

    Yet just over a century ago people were paying the equivalent of $2 for every mile that they drove too.

    Again roads are not expected to be profitable to survive.

    An Amtrak train moving containers for UPS or FedEx can’t hurt.

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