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.
Not all of that 64 billion passenger miles took place on scheduled intercity buses — most of it is charter buses, sightseeing tours, and similar trips, but these trips are still important. For what it’s worth, I estimate that scheduled intercity buses carry about twice as many passenger miles as Amtrak. Yet Amtrak got a billion dollars from the CARES Act and is asking Congress for $1.5 billion more. By that standard, motorcoaches should get $25 billion.
I don’t think we should give motorcoach companies a huge bailout. I don’t think we should have given Amtrak a bailout either. I do think we should open up more of the economy before a large segment of it goes under.
You should not combine nicotine, liquor viagra 100 mg regencygrandenursing.com and other ED drugs with the 100mg strength. Parents who are committed to having their teen take a driver’s Ed course, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t viagra for cheap do to protect yourself, family, properties, and neighborhood from any accident or hazards either caused by negligence or lack of prior experience. It brand viagra australia s over or under intake or improper use may outcome with default response. However, there are also various chronic diseases, the buy cialis which have been linked to Erectile Dysfunction condition, which includes ulcer and various mental conditions. More important, before Congress hands out any more money, something it is fond of doing, it should consider the relative importance of various modes of transportation. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics recently released its calculations for passenger miles by mode in 2018. Automobiles (including motorcycles) carried more than 80 percent of travel; airlines more than 12 percent. Urban transit and Amtrak together don’t quite add up to 1 percent. The rest, a little more than 6 percent, is non-transit buses (which include motorcoaches but also includes school buses).
(In making these calculations, I didn’t include heavy trucks in the totals as they don’t carry passengers. The bureau has left non-commercial air travel out of the table since around 2001, when it was 15.9 billion passenger miles. Compared with commercial air travel, which was above 700 billion in 2018, it seems insignificant, but it is two-and-a-half times Amtrak. Walking and cycling are also left out, but Virginia Tech planner Ralph Buehler estimates that Americans walk about five times as many miles and bicycle about a third more miles than they ride Amtrak.)
Meanwhile, transit sympathizers at Bloomberg argue that transit
“matters in the George Floyd protests” because poor people need “transportation access.” Apparently, cities once built freeways through black neighborhoods so therefore cars are racist and we shouldn’t build any more roads.
As the Antiplanner noted recently, even in New York transit doesn’t provide as much access to jobs as driving. Not taking steps to reduce congestion disproportionately harms low-income people who have cars because their schedules are less flexible than those of the upper-middle class groups that make these kinds of decisions. If you want to give poor people equal access, give them cars, give up on transit, and reduce traffic congestion.
With another pandemic and a couple more George Floyds, Amtrak and public transit will run at a profit.
“Run” being used loosely here, since they are providing reduced service (without a comparable reduction in costs).
It also harms low-income people who rely on bus-based forms of transit for some or all of their trip. In NYC this affects hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of both commuters and non-work travelers. A policy of ‘benign neglect’ toward congestion imposes equal-opportunity misery on the population.
Incidentally, did Bloomberg already forget about the large number of poor people in NYC who have already been adversely affected by illness brought about through contact with other infected people on board that city’s trains and buses?