Inter-City Rail? Why Not Take the Bus?

by Robert Poole, JR of the Reason Foudation, in Surface Transportation Innovations, Issue no. 67, May 2009.

COST Comments: The bold portion of the first paragraph is added by COST and is one of the strong COST principle foundations: Transportation must be cost effective to be sustainable.

As I’ve said many times before, I am a life-long rail fan who has ridden trains on four continents. As a transportation professional, however, it’s incumbent on me to advocate meeting transportation needs in cost-effective ways. Before we spent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on inter-city passenger rail, I think it behooves us to take a closer look at the potential of inter-city bus travel.

Let’s start with a report from Nathan Associates, “The Economic Impacts and Social Benefits of the U.S. Motorcoach Industry,” by Robert Damuth, December 2008. While commissioned by the bus industry, it relies on reputable data sources. From this report you will find that scheduled intercity bus service is available from 3,046 locations across the nation, compared with just 505 Amtrak stations. The demographics of inter-city bus passengers are quite different from Amtrak, too: 54% of bus passengers make $25,000 or less, compared with 23% of Amtrak passengers. And while 49% of Amtrak passengers make more than $50,000, that’s true of just 19% of inter-city bus passengers. So if the justification for spending large amounts of taxpayers’ money on inter-city rail is to serve people who don’t have air service and couldn’t afford it anyway, inter-city bus is far better targeted to do that than Amtrak.

What about emissions, especially of greenhouse gases? GHGs are proportional to energy use (BTUs per passenger mile), and Table 6-1 in the Nathan report shows that motorcoaches average 668 BTU/pass.-mi. compared with 2,061 for Amtrak trains. You might be skeptical that these are industry-massaged numbers, so check out a very different source: the Union of Concerned Scientists’ recent “Getting There Greener” report. While it touts Amtrak over driving, its chapter on inter-city bus simply gushes. And its Table 4 compares five modes for vacation trips: motorcoach, train, car, SUV, and airplane. Measured by pounds of CO2 per trip, the humble inter-city bus beats the train by a huge margin, for every distance from 100 miles to 2,500 miles, and for trips by one, two, or four travelers. (Example: two people going 500 miles would have a carbon footprint of 170 lbs. by bus but 430 lbs. by train.)

Today’s inter-city bus industry has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. Greyhound was acquired by U.K.’s First Group (which also now owns Ryder and Laidlaw’s vast school bus business). Coach USA (now owned by U.K.’s Stagecoach) has developed Megabus, appealing to thrifty young professionals. Greyhound recently launched BoltBus to compete for that market niche. Last fall a team of railroad and bus entrepreneurs launched Steel City Flyer, offering luxury bus service twice daily between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, replacing now-cancelled USAirways service. There is even a website to enable you to find (and compare prices and services on) the premium bus line that’s best suited to your planned trip. It’s called BusJunction.com, and it styles itself as an Expedia or Orbitz for bus travelers.

Besides considerably lower fares than Amtrak, much wider geographic coverage, and a much smaller carbon footprint, inter-city bus service has something else going for it: negligible cost to taxpayers. The Nathan study puts the federal subsidy per passenger mile (averaged over the 10 years from 1996 to 2005) at 0.1 cents. Amtrak’s figure is 19.2 cents. Those numbers are consistent with federal subsidy figures in the 2005 U.S. DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics report “Federal Subsidies to Passenger Transportation.”

I rest my case.

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