Megabus, which serves the Midwest and Northeast, is starting service in the South and to celebrate it is giving away 10,000 tickets to or from Atlanta and eleven other cities. Even if you don’t get a free ticket, when the Antiplanner checked there were still seats on many routes for $1 to $3.
Megabus’ new service connects Atlanta to Birmingham, Charlotte, Chattanooga, Gainesville, Jacksonville, Knoxville, Memphis, Mobile, Montgomery, Nashville, and Orlando. Buses to Knoxville, Mobile, Nashville, and Orlando stop once; the rest are non-stop.
Megabus says it has carried more than 12 million passengers since it started operations in 2006. The Antiplanner estimates that Megabus’ fares average about 7 cents a passenger mile. Considering that Amtrak averages 30 cents a passenger mile, driving is about 35 cents a vehicle mile, and short-haul airfares tend to be well above average airfares of 13 cents a mile, Megabus’ low fares could “induce” significant amounts of new travel. Contrary to popular belief, induced travel is a good thing because it means people have more mobility and all the benefits that come from that mobility.
Some tadalafil tabs people have difficulty achieving erection, while others have found no such effect and another found the opposite. However, the seriousness of this issue has prompted many medicos to find a solution to this order viagra on line dysfunction and once got infected man had to accept the fact because with erectile dysfunction also you can enjoy sexual intimacy by using this jelly. This is an embarrassing aspect, and you do not want such miseries to hamper your life, it is very important that you not let this be sildenafil canadian pharmacy your downfall. How to Use samples viagra pdxcommercial.com? viagra is to be yourself and be genuine in the way they expected. Many of the new routes are between 300 and 400 miles, which may be marginal for intercity buses. In 2007, Megabus attempted to introduce service in California, where most routes (LA-SF, LA-Vegas, LA-Phoenix) were about that length, and it was pulled out after a year. While the buses attracted tourists, they mainly used them just four days a week, and there were not enough business travelers the other three days to support the service.
Megabus is owned by Stagecoach Group, a British company that arose from Britain’s privatization of its intercity and local transit service. It also operates Coach USA. First Group, another big transportation company, also emerged from British privatization. It operates in the U.S. under the names First Transit, First Student, Greyhound, and Bolt Bus, among others. A French company, Veolia Transportation, owns SuperShuttle.
I learned at the California Bus Association convention that Megabus does not directly operate all of its buses. Instead, it contracts at least some of them out to local operators, which is a policy the Antiplanner has recommended to public transit agencies for many years. First Transit (with operations in more than 200 cities) and Veolia (in Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, and San Diego among other places) are probably the two biggest operators of contracted public transit services. Stagecoach also contracts some lines in the New York and Chicago metro areas.
The Antiplanner wishes Megabus well in its Southern venture.
While wishing Megabus well, let me note that:
The bus and rail markets are not comparable as these buses do not serve small towns between end points.
The average Amtrak fare includes sleeper accomodation charges (50% of long distance train revenue) and Acela business and first class fares (10% of ridership). Amtrak coach fares outside the northeast average 12 to 20 cents per passenger mile.
The bus is charging what the market will bear, which is close to zero.
Autocentric southern cities will not be provide the same market of patrons seen in the northeast and midwest.
Amtrak only provides daytime service on two of these routes – Atlanta to Birmingham and Jacksonville to Orlando.
Its also surprising that Megabus couldn’t figure out how to make a stop in Tampa or Daytona from Gainsville and Orlando. Perhaps they are confused about the real transportation markets in Florida, just like the Miami – Tampa HSR folks were. Skipping Auburn, Alabama and Tuscaloosa, Alabama is a similar oversight that fails to grasp that its primary market is college kids and other young adults.
I also wonder why all of South Carolina is not served, nor Savannah. Maybe Megabus has not fully figured out social and economic links in the South before jumping into the marketplace.
Andrew wrote:
The bus is charging what the market will bear, which is close to zero.
And apparently covering their capital costs and making a profit, something Amtrak has never been capable of.
Autocentric southern cities will not be provide the same market of patrons seen in the northeast and midwest.
If Megabus concludes that there’s no profit to be made in the South, then presumably they’ll stop this service.
I am sure the Antiplanner is aware of this, but just to clarify, the cost of a car being about 35 cents per vehicle mile is hugely variable. I drive a used 98 Honda civic for more like 20 cents per vehicle mile, but will not be able to calculate the real cost until I sell the car. What is clear is that extra miles put on a car are significantly cheaper than the average, and this is especially true for a newer car when one of the main costs is depreciation. On a used car repair costs go up but depreciation goes down. Frequently I see transit advocates using figures of 55 cents per vehicle mile forgetting that city buses compete with used cars and that extra miles driven are cheaper than the average. With a family of four in a used car cost per passenger mile falls to something like 5 cents per passenger mile, less than the bus cost of 7 cents per passenger mile, and far more convenient.
“it contracts at least some of them out to local operators, which is a policy the Antiplanner has recommended to public transit agencies for many years.”
Well they must be listening to you. This is done almost everywhere (not always for every service type, but in almost every major US city transit agencies contract out some services).
“Many of the new routes are between 300 and 400 miles, which may be marginal for intercity buses.”
In the UK, experience is mixed. Against stopping services using DMUs, buses are very definitely competitive for journey times – and I would use buses instead of rail if they stopped at my city instead of going straight past it. Against HSR (125mph), buses cannot compete on time, although they can on price.
“If Megabus concludes that there’s no profit to be made in the South, then presumably they’ll stop this service.”
Can you really do that?
I will say it again. High speed rail is a very niche market. A little further and it can’t compete with air. A little shorter and it can’t compete with car/bus/slow rail. It can’t make more than a tiny number of in-between stops. The markets have to be just the right distance. The customers for high speed rail have to be rich enough to pay for the added speed, but not rich enough to pay for air or high class transport.
Even those with high global warming sensibilities will find it to be a niche market. The trains would have to be electric, and they are clearly less efficient than slower rail.
Hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars to subsidize and build for this niche market hardly seems like a national priority to me. Especially if the only high speed rail is solely inside one wealthy state.
FrancisKing wrote:
In the UK, experience is mixed. Against stopping services using DMUs, buses are very definitely competitive for journey times – and I would use buses instead of rail if they stopped at my city instead of going straight past it. Against HSR (125mph), buses cannot compete on time, although they can on price.
I have much more familiarity with bus service in the Nordic nations, which do have some decently long-haul intercity bus routes (over 500 miles/800 km) running generally north and south. The buses are clean and well-maintained, and they operate on highways that are generally in good condition.
There is an English-language paper from 2003 online here (.pdf format) which describes bus service in Finland. My biggest gripe is that intercity buses operating on Finnish arterial highways are usually limited to a posted speed limit of only 80 k/h, which is too low (and I’ve been told that it’s set that way in part thanks to lobbying by the railroad workers’ unions).
80 kph is by no means low!