Spiffy New Bus Lines Could Derail High-Speed Train Plans

Quick, what's the fastest-growing mode of transportation in the U.S. today?

If you said intercity buses, you're right. Admittedly, taking the bus is a relatively unglamorous way to travel, as a quick perusal of our Greyhound reviews will quickly reveal. But no one's exactly dying to climb aboard Amtrak either, even if they can scrape together the $232 DC-New York fare for the "high-speed" Acela Express or $150 for the slightly slower Northeast Regional.

Don't even mention airline travel. We all know how well that's been going lately.

But unless you live along the Northeast Corridor or parts of the West Coast, where Amtrak has been the only decent alternative to airlines until recently, you may not be aware of a new development.

Those pesky entrepreneurs have been at it again. This time they've taken a tip from the likes of Southwest and Virgin America and started up some pretty spiffy new bus lines with goofy names like Megabus, Vamoose and Boltbus.

What's unusual about these bus lines is that they have very simple routes – along the lines to Washington to Baltimore to Philadelphia to New York to Boston. Not hard to figure out. They also have new buses with bathrooms and Wi-Fi and they leave from convenient street corners and parking lots, not dingy bus terminals in downtrodden parts of town. Many offer reserved seating, movies, snacks, power outlets for your laptops and gadgets and group plans.

Low cost

But what's really unusual about these new buses is the fares. They're a fraction of the cost of train or air travel and they're about half the cost of driving, where one faces stiff tolls on major highways, bridges tunnels and whatever else our starving states can dream up.

Here's a sample of fares for next-day travel from DC to New York:

(Fares change constantly depending on demand.  Your results may vary.)

At ConsumerAffairs.com, we're quite familiar with all these bus lines. Our associates take them regularly between Washington and New York and strongly prefer them to the train, cost notwithstanding. It's a little hard to say why, except that they are somehow "cool" while the train is just, well, a train full of old guys in suits while the buses tend to be a younger hipper crowd of students, budding politicos and would-be Wall Street moguls.

Depending on traffic, the trip takes about four and a half to five hours. The Amtrak Accela takes about three hours if it doesn't break down. A regional Amtrak takes about three and a half to four, assuming nothing goes wrong.

Who did this?

So what politician should we be hoisting on our shoulders to celebrate this innovation in travel? Well, frankly, you'd have to go to Plains, Georgia if you wanted to thank the person who made the wheels of the bus go round and round, for it was under Jimmy Carter that the old Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was abolished and travel was basically – gasp! -- deregulated.

Yep. A few decades ago you couldn't just buy a bus and start hauling people around. You still can't of course. There are safety regulations to meet, licenses to get and so forth but once you have all that, you don't need anyone's permission to begin serving the DC-New York route – or the Ames-Keokuk route for that matter.

It took some aspiring Chinese immigrants to realize this and start running buses from New York's Chinatown to DC's. Others quickly caught on, including newly-privatized British carrier Megabus.

So what we now have in much of the country's most populous regions is bare-knuckled competition to see who can offer the lowest fares, best service, most frequent schedule, spiffiest buses and so on.

Contrast this to the agony that is high-speed rail. All it takes to start a new bus route is a highway and a bus. To start a new high-speed rail service requires billions and billions of dollars, and then a few more billion to keep it running and in at least semi-safe condition.

(If you don't believe new rail systems deteriorate quickly, take a look at Washington's Metro system today compared to a few decades ago when everything still worked.)

All of this is our way of backing into the surprising statistic that since 2006, intercity buses have been the nation's fastest-growing form of transportation, growing nearly twice as fast as Amtrak.

At a time when Congress is at loggerheads over reducing the budget while the Obama Administration is proposing an expensive high-speed rail network, various think tankers, like the Cato Institute's Randal O'Toole are taking the opportunity to say it might just be better to swallow our pride and take the bus.

We're not taking sides in that fight but for now, consumers who haven't tried one of these new bus lines are, well, missing the bus.