Tag Archives: intercity bus

A year ago, the U.S. Department of Transportation dramatically shut down more than two dozen “Chinatown” bus companies for safety violations. At the time, the Antiplanner expressed skepticism, saying that if the same criteria were applied to transit agencies such as Washington Metro or Boston’s MBTA, they would be shut down too. But the DOT said it relied on a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) study that found that “curbside” buses were seven times more dangerous than conventional intercity buses.

Fung Wah, the original Chinatown bus company, was not one of the ones shut down in last year’s federal raids. Wikipedia photo by Toytoy.

Now, some people are challenging this study, saying that its methods were so faulty it may as well have been completely fabricated. The NTSB has a reputation for sound quantitative analysis, but this study was first questioned by Aaron Brown, a Wall Street financial analyst, who accused the NTSB of “statistical malpractice” for improperly manipulating data and refusing to release its raw data. Based on what data were available, Brown estimated that curbside buses were actually safer than conventional ones.

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Half truths, innuendo, and pseudo-science form the basis of a recent response to the Antiplanner’s recent paper, Intercity Buses: The Forgotten Mode. The basic thesis of the response is that intercity buses have a role to play in a “balanced transportation system,” but they are “no replacement for high-speed rail.”

Of course, the Antiplanner never argued that buses were a replacement for true high-speed rail. But it did show that existing bus schedules in many corridors are faster, more frequent, and charge far lower fares than Amtrak in the same corridors. Of course, there is a “replacement” for high-speed rail: it is called “air travel” and it is far faster and costs about a fifth as much per passenger mile as Amtrak’s Acela.

In any case, America 2050 says the Antiplanner ignored “one of the most powerful arguments for rail: providing an alternative to highway congestion.” I didn’t address that argument in the paper on buses because, as I’ve shown before, it’s a stupid argument. Highways move about 85 percent of all passenger travel, and more than a quarter of all ton-miles of freight in this country. If they are congested, maybe we should relieve that congestion rather than spending hundreds of billions of dollars on an elitist rail network that won’t relieve congestion and won’t carry than a tiny fraction of the number of people (and none of the freight) moved on the highways.

But we can’t fix highway congestion, says America 2050: “providing additional road space does not solve congestion; in fact it creates additional demand for driving.” That’s another stupid argument for four reasons. First, my bus paper never advocated building new roads, and if asked, I would have suggested relieving congestion using congestion pricing of roads before building new capacity.

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The Antiplanner rarely responds to comments in a post, but Andrew asked many good questions and requested a lot of background information last week. Most of his questions are answered by citations in the report, but since he did not seem to understand those citations, here are my responses.

1. “Intercity buses carry at least 50% more PM than Amtrak in Amtrak’s showcase Northeast Corridor.” “How is this computed and what are the data sources? What trains are you including in the Amtrak total vs. what buses?

I compiled the on-line schedules for what turned out to be sixteen different bus companies for the week of May 15 to 21. The schedules included all buses connecting Northeast Corridor cities: Boston, Providence, New Haven, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington. I used Google maps to calculate the bus miles between these cities. I then calculated seat miles assuming that premiere lines like Bolt, DC2NY, and Vamoose have 50 seats, Megabuses have 79 seats, and Chinatown buses have 56 seats. My numbers may be an underestimate as some companies may not post their schedules on the web.

To convert to passenger miles, I assumed the seats are 60 percent full. According to the American Bus Association, this is accurate for the major carriers but conservative for the Chinatown buses. Even if the buses are only 50 percent full (which is Amtrak’s average), they carry far more people than Amtrak.

My Amtrak numbers come from page C1 of Amtrak’s 2010 performance report. The September report includes data for the entire fiscal year. Seat miles and passenger miles can both be calculated from this table. I only included Northeast Corridor trains, not trains such as the Crescent, but I also did not include buses such as New York to Raleigh or New York to Atlanta.

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