Comment by starkparker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by starkparker | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Houston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Tampa, Louisville, Charlottesville, Portland, Oregon, and other downtown bus depots have shuttered in recent years. Bus terminals in major hubs like Chicago and Dallas are also set to close. Greyhound and other companies have relocated their stops far away from city centers, which are often inaccessible by public transit, switched to curbside service or eliminated routes altogether.

The Portland depot closed two months before COVID arrived; the ticket booth moved one whole block south. Two years prior TriMet had tried to buy it and turn it into a parking depot for its buses and trains. The new curbside stop is closer to parking. Nothing moved more than two blocks from Union Station.

The old 30,000-square-foot building became a 96-bed county-run homeless shelter, which the city needs a hell of a lot more than a bus terminal.

https://www.portlandtribune.com/news/greyhound-station-to-re...

https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2019/09/greyhound-moves...

As far as Chicago is concerned, the obvious answer is to find room at Union Station.

For some unknown reason, neither CTA ("The El" and subways) nor Greyhound/Trailways are directly connected to the Union Station building; each is at least a two block walk, with limited accessibility.

Only Amtrak and Metra trains are inside the building. CTA does have a bus stop outside across the street.

Putting everything into one facility would make it easier to use all of it.

Edit: there are a couple of potential reasons for this. First, Amtrak likely does not want to compete with Greyhound on fare pricing. Second, adult beverages are sold within Union Station and Metra is particularly friendly towards them; Greyhound is very much not.

My daughters take FlixBus up from/down to Corvallis (Oregon State) and Eugene (U of Oregon) and the stop is a couple of blocks north of Union Station, as you say.

I took a different bus to Eugene, The Point, where you buy tickets from Amtrak but the bus is run by a different company. The bus boards right outside Union Station in Portland. The nice thing for me was that I able to show a ticket for that day to the two security guards and was able to use the restroom. I'm not sure I could have talked them into it otherwise. I was dropped off at the Eugene Amtrak station where there weren't any security guards.

I see restroom access as a competitive advantage but The Point only goes up and down I-5 so it's limited in appeal.

https://www.oregon-point.com/

How does this single example disprove the claim?

I never suggested it did. It's just significant context not in the article.

Portland was part of the claim. So it at least disproves the claim for Portland.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com