A couple of weeks ago, more than 600 motorcoaches — that special breed of buses with extra-comfortable seats and large luggage bays beneath the passenger area — held a rally in Washington DC to complain that their government-subsidized competitors received a bailout but they did not. Yesterday, California motorcoach operators held a similar rally in Sacramento asking the governor to re-open the state, but it was overshadowed by George Floyd protests.
A few years ago, the Antiplanner wrote a paper called Intercity Buses: The Forgotten Mode, but I guess it is still forgotten. When we think of intercity travel, we think of planes, cars, and Amtrak, but rarely think about buses. Congress seems to be the same way.
The American Bus Association‘s most recent motorcoach census estimates that buses carried 64 billion passenger miles in 2017. That’s 10 times as many as Amtrak. In fact, it’s more than Amtrak and urban transit combined. Continue reading
