The Megabus Effect
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
"On most city-to-city trips under 300 miles, the curbside bus offers tickets that cost a tenth of those of Amtrak and far less even than the price of the gas to get there by car."
Passengers book online, tickets are delivered to cell phones, busses are equipped with WiFi and power outlets at each seat.
Article points out the advantages of busses over high-speed rail, which has tended to get more press as being the future of mid-haul intercity travel. Building rail lines requires years of time and bureaucratic approval, and you better hope you were right about the demand for the route. Busses can go wherever needed on existing roads and reconfigure routes easily.
Transportation improvements over time tend to make some trips possible in much less time than was previously possible; this is true of the automobile, the Interstate highway system, the jet airplane, and the Golden Gate Bridge. Nobody has demonstrated a 150 MPH bus running on the existing Interstate highway network yet. High speed rail has the potential to increase the distance that can be covered in a 60-90 minute commute.
Yes, but at what cost?
And then there's that pesky "and how many people will benefit?" problem.
This can be a pro, but also a con; in particular, it means people are unable to assume stable routes when planning things like new developments or where to live/work. Bus routes change all the time, but I can count on the subway station near my apartment probably still being there in 10 years, and probably still running roughly the same line as it does now.
It doesn't have to be an either-or situation, as both modes have their strengths and weaknesses. For example, while bus is cheaper than rail, it still has to deal with the same problems that automobile traffic has to deal with (weather and traffic delays being the most common). HSR is more expensive than bus, but is faster (talking about real HSR, not the Acela) and it's cheaper to add capacity.
That said, buses and HSR are complementary in lots of ways and there's no reason why they can't work together (just like no one is asking people to choose between buses and cars, we can have both). One example is the joint-ticketing arrangement between the Amtrak Downeaster (Portland ME) and Concord Coach Lines. Buy a bus ticket and miss the bus? Just jump on the next train (and vice versa).
What they also do, though, is partner with other non-discount companies, so if you get a ticket from Megabus (and their biggest selling point is that you can get fares from as low as £1), there's a reasonable chance that you won't actually be on a Megabus vehicle, they will have just sold off another company's seat that would otherwise have gone un-sold.
(Megabus is actually owned by Stagecoach, a UK company with some presence in the States, and the fact that Stagecoach is one of the biggest travel operators in the UK obviously helps them, as Stagecoach will often by the company Megabus customers travel with when there weren't enough tickets sold to justify a Megabus vehicle.)
Even furniture stores in India will sell you a competitors piece of furniture if he doesn't have anything you like in return for a commission.
But in the end the price really does make up for it, and also each trip always has some weird goings on which is always fun. For example one trip there was a man who could not speak english at all who proceeded to drink himself stupid, get off at a random service station on the M6, fall asleep on a bench and refuse to come back on the bus. What a horrible morning he must have had.
I don't claim to have done the numbers myself, but during the volcanic shutdown last year, More Or Less' (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd) presenter was stranded on the far side of Europe and calculated the emissions cost of travelling back overland by various means as he did. The answer - it was roughly level; the problem wasn't so much the plane as the long-distance travel.
A typical single passenger automobile trip has about equivalent CO2 emissions, per-passenger, as a typical jet trip. (At least whenever I've run the numbers.)
But since the bus ride is less than the cost of gas for an automobile, I would think that the bus must be per-passenger somewhat more efficient. It's hard to get much of a discount on commodities like fuel.
See e.g. http://www.greenrationbook.org.uk/resources/footprints-air-t...
They made losses but took nearly every passenger on the route. They then bought the company which previously ran the route and fares rapidly escalated. Manchester now has extortionate bus fares and Stagecoach run virtually all routes.
I imagine that their business model is almost identical with Megabus: sink the competition by undercutting their profitable routes, buy them out/bankrupt them and then reap your rewards.
sidenote: I used to vaguely know the chap who almost founded Stagecoach with his wife. They divorced and she took what was a small local bus company and built it up with her new partner. He started a new company called Highwayman (robs the stagecoach). It remained a small (< 8 buses) operator in scotland until he died a couple of years ago.
I've seen them remove unprofitable routes, but even then I can't figure it out, since running a fleet of buses must be a fairly costly operation.
So, there are hardly any long-distance bus routes within Germany, only to Berlin (which was an exception from the person transport law that was made in the Cold War era), and to neighboring countries.
http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article12492654/Bahn-verliert-... [German]
Of course, public transport is a complex issue - the government as the current owner of the railway system is still trying to protect some routes, so we have to wait and see how the licensing for long-distance routes is working out.
And the Deutsche Bahn (German Railways) is also the biggest provider of bus travel, so it will be quite hard for new companies to get into the market.
And I've often wished for an LA->LV option that wasn't either shady or as expensive as the cost of a Southwest ticket.