Bus Companies Recovering

The nation’s private bus industry is recovering from the pandemic, reports the Chaddick Institute, which has followed the bus industry for nearly two decades. Examples of this recovery include:

One sign of recovery is the introduction of the Jet bus, a first-class service between New York and DC which has just 14 motion-cancelling seats aboard each coach.

• Fifteen different carriers are once again operating buses in the New York-Washington corridor;
• New, first-class bus services are being offered by Texas’ Red Coach in October and the NY-DC Jet (which promises the smoothest possible rides thanks to”motion cancelling technology”) in November;
• A variety of bus companies, including Adirondack, Burlington, Martz, and New York Trailways, Jefferson, and Peter Pan have increased their bus frequencies and services since July 2021;
• FlixMobility’s purchase of Greyhound, showing that it is optimistic about the future of intercity bus services.

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While industry prospects are looking up for now, an article in Univision News estimates that 25 percent of the 3,000 private bus operators (most of them family-owned charter companies) that existed before the pandemic were put out of business by the COVID shut-downs. Despite Chaddick’s optimism, FirstGroup’s fire-sale of Greyhound to Flixbus may have been more out of desperation than optimism.

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, private buses carried 345 billion passenger-miles in 2019, almost half as many as were carried by the airlines. I’m pretty sure the bureau’s bus estimate is too high, but even my own much more conservative estimate of 117 billion is still 18 times as many as the 6.5 billion passenger-miles carried by Amtrak and more than twice as many as carried by the entire public transit industry.

Congress gave the airlines $74 billion, transit $69.5 billion and Amtrak $3.7 billion in COVID relief funds, but provided only $2.0 billion for the private bus industry to share with private ferry boats and other “transportation service companies.” This fund ran out before many bus companies were able to access it, which is one reason why so many went out of business.

While I am not convinced Congress should have given any of this money to transportation providers, so long as it did so, it should have at least distributed the funds in proportion to the services provided by each segment of the industry. That would mean that, if the airlines got $74 billion, the transit industry would have received $5.3 billion and Amtrak less than $640 million. If you believe the Bureau of Transportation Statistics data, the private bus industry should have received $34 billion, and even if you believe my estimate it should have been $11.5 billion.

Instead, Congress seemed to give out funds proportional to its historic subsidies to the various sectors, which is a ridiculous way to do it. Just as Congress has champions for transit and Amtrak, someone in Congress needs to be a champion for the private bus industry.