Looking for America: Shifting tides for Greyhound Lines’s operations in the U.S.
Advisor: Hansen
Internship Location: American Bus Association
Onsite Mentor: Pete Pantuso, former President and CEO of the American Bus Association from 1996-2024
Greyhound buses are a uniquely American icon with uniquely American issues. Founded in Hibbing, Minn., in 1914, "The Hound," as it's affectionately referred to by some, has seen the highest of highs and lowest of lows across its century-long history. The business finds itself at a modern turning point regarding modernizing and difficulties in making itself an attractive option to a wide array of travelers. My interest in Greyhound specifically comes from its reputation as the runt of the American intercity travel litter: in modern times, not as comfortable as a train, nor as efficient as a plane.
Research will mainly come through libraries, newspaper archives, and interviews. My external advisor, Peter Pantuso from the American Bus Association, has connections in both academia and within the industry that I could take advantage of to further my research. San Jose State’s main library also offers plenty of documents for research, and Newspapers.com along with the Library of Congress will contain a large archive of American newspapers going back to well beyond even Greyhound’s origins. The Greyhound Museum in Hibbing, Minn., and the Pacific Bus Museum both have email contacts on their webpages, which I intend on inquiring through. I intend on creating a short documentary film around or under half-an-hour long on this subject. It will consist of interviews and monologuing, as well as, logistics allowing, a trip report on a Greyhound bus. I would like interviews to be conducted with both advocate/government types like Pantuso as well as historians and researchers.
Project Blog
Week 1: Hibbing, Minnesota
I don't blame you if "Greyhound bus" doesn't necessarily evoke the cleanest, classiest way to travel. The intercity bus is not a glamorous way to move around the country, and hasn't ever been. Owing to my unhealthy obsession to the ways people move, this entire project will be about intercity buses.
For starters, Greyhound Lines is an American bus company. The earliest form of the modern company was founded in 1914 as a mining shuttle in Hibbing, Minnesota, and has grown to easily become one of the most recognizable travel brands in the country still to this day. My project will revolve around an analysis of Greyhound's historical advertising campaigns, pop media relating to Greyhound, as well as the company's own handling of crises and struggles to conduct an autopsy on the company. Following this, with comparisons to the fates of other companies in the business of moving people, I'll try to look ahead to how the intercity passenger bus industry might look in the coming decades and produce a documentary film on the plight of the intercity bus.
Through the two main historical accounts that I've reviewed, Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) was cited repeatedly for its massive positive impact on Greyhound's ticket sales. The two main characters, played by Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, find love on a Greyhound bus after Colbert's character runs away from home to nix an arranged marriage. The film's Greyhound made people equal: the millionaire played by Colbert and the good-ol'-boy reporter played by Gable were from such different social backgrounds, and yet found themselves on the same bus from Florida to New York that one fateful night. The folks on the bus were eccentric and interesting as well, with musicians roving around the vehicles!
Music is tougher to find, mainly because Spotify's lyric searching system is practically unusable for a query of this size. I relied on reddit threads and old blog posts to find songs about Greyhound buses. I finally settled on Simon & Garfunkel's "America," Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind," and The Mountain Goats' "See America Right" as two relatively old and one more modern song respectively mentioning the Hound. The romanticism continues between these three just as it had in the Depression-era films. The depiction of bus travel throughout stays relatively consistent, with themes of freedom and adventure present throughout. Even within the Mountain Goats' grittier, modern Greyhound commentary, the nature of bus travel reflects the narrator's freedom from prison.
Thank you for reading. Next week, I intend on spending ten hours a day marathoning through newspaper archives.
Week 2: A Price to Pay
Welcome back! As I'd promised last week, I spent a long period of time this week sitting in newspaper archives. I'll discuss my findings, as well as some renewed interest in somewhat tangential topics, below.
Through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Greyhound found itself in a tough position in the brutal intercity travel market. Eisenhower's Interstate system was a mixed bag for bus travel: the buses could move much, much quicker between major population centers, but at the expense of much of the middle class audience who would opt to drive personal vehicles instead. Furthermore, airline deregulation made short-haul, low-cost airlines a sustainable business model, undercutting Greyhound's traditional selling point of being the cheapest way to travel. Finally, Amtrak's nationalization in the 1972 made passenger rail viable again in the United States, often running at overwhelming deficits but backed by taxpayer dollars.
Greyhound was as expensive as the train, as slow as a train or car, and as uncomfortable as a modern flight. But, despite everything, the company was fine, or at least for the time being. The future of bus travel was uncertain at best, given the walls from external competition had begun caving in and the American economy was slumping.
The company's higher-ups turn to Washington, desperately lobbying for regulatory reforms to allow them to cut off their worst performing routes and concentrate traffic on high demand routes. And Reagan's government officially deregulates in 1982, passing the aptly-named Bus Regulatory Reform Act.
Despite Greyhound's long-held pro-deregulation stance, it quickly forced the company into a position it couldn't hold. Much like the airline industry, lower-cost competitors were chomping at the company's bottom line, better positioned for this new industry than the old Greyhound could be; chairman John Teets described this as their "price to pay" for deregulation. The company would upset organized labor during this process as well, with the landmark 1983 strike partly originating from proposed wage cuts in the wake of post-deregulation financial hardship.
The company was hemorrhaging money. Rural service was the next thing on the chopping block. A major part of my research this week was a 1992 survey conducted by the U.S. General Accounting Office on the decline in rural intercity bus service post-deregulation, providing some important data on the short-term impacts on service. The survey provided no concrete conclusion as to specific negative effects on rural service, but did indicate that the existing trend of declining passenger numbers and mileage continued through deregulation without a hitch. A startling statistic did indicate a 52% decline in locales served from 1982 to 1991, which may have resulted from deregulation making it much more pracatical to abandon rural routes, but which is unfair to pin solely on the act itself.
But, just as the government had done for Amtrak, it could step in somehow and preserve these local routes. The study stated over three-fourths of those communities losing service were small towns of under 10,000 people; they'd lose transit access to services like education and hospitals that might not be open in their specific community (the study was aware of these effects, but wasn't able to quantify them).
Going forward, I want to examine what federal subsidies have done for rural transit since deregulation. The Federal Transit Administration's Section 5311(f) grants are the current major system of state-supported but privately operated bus transit to rural communities, but the program itself has a presumably convoluted history and inherent flaws.
Week 3: The Gang Goes Bankrupt
Welcome back! If there's a single thing I've learned through this process, it's how to read better. It's been another long week of reading, so without further ado, let's finish filling in our metaphorical timeline of Greyhound's history onwards from the 1990s.
My focus on literature was more so directed at the industry as a whole this week. It's important to see how government involvement at this point kept lines running and shaped the entire sector into what it is today. 5311(f) funds, as a reminder, are the federal government's method of providing grant funds to private operators running rural intercity bus services. That might seem like a mouthful, but it's a pretty simple system.
5311(f), through its predecessor 18(i), date back to the 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (introduced, by the way, by San Jose native Norm Mineta!). They work by shipping every state a lump sum of cash every year, and having 15% of this cash be apportioned towards intercity bus programs. This manifests itself in many different ways; in states like Oregon, Colorado, and Ohio, funds go to private operators under state mandates to run expansive statewide intercity networks. Other states use a "Request for Proposal" (RFP) system to give money to private operators who wish to run rural routes, while some just simply don't have 5311(f) programs.
This program has some strange caveats, though. 5311(f) funds can only go towards private operators, and can only cover up to half of the operating deficit on a given route, leading private operators to be less interested in running these routes and state governments being less willing to fund them. Truly public transit -- where drivers are hired and paid by a government body -- also can't happen through this framework, and state funding is usually difficult to acquire, and is often inconsistent.
Where, then, do we go from this?
Well, first, let's look at the bus industry itself. One seismic shift in recent decades within the industry is the introduction of curbside buses. In a curbside model, bus operators pick people up and drop them off at signs on the side of the street instead of stopping in a traditional large terminal, like a train would. It has led to the subsequent selloff of many older Greyhound city center terminals, like the recent suspension of service to the beautiful streamline moderne Cleveland terminal (below -- Wikimedia).
This shift is, as always, complicated. For the operator, it's a more dynamic business model, allowing for companies to easily shift service to the whims of supply and demand than before. But for the passenger, a great deal of comfort is lost on the ride. Making transfers on brutal, long-distance trips is a stressful experience, and the lack of a physical terminal to accommodate that transfer makes a difficult situation worse.
5311(f) covers bus terminal grants as well as running service. It's a lot of needs crammed into a lump sum in the very low tens of millions for most states, and often falls short of a truly world-class system. Curbside buses are the future way to save money and make a modern bus network, but come at a steep price for the passenger. Intercity buses, going into this decade, are in a weird moment. The next few weeks will be focused around the modern state of intercity buses, and what this industry might look like decades down the line.
Week 4: Fuuuuuutuuuure!
Much like that one iconic GIF of Squidward in future shock, the intercity bus industry is being dragged kicking and screaming into the future. Our saga through time continues into the 21st century!
We ended last week with curbside buses, but it's always worth talking a little bit more about them. As a reminder, curbside buses.... operate like normal buses.... but from a curb. Instead of a station building. It's quite simple, really! These began to shake the industry in the early 2000s with the rise of "Chinatown" buses, a catch-all term for a very particular segment of bus companies operating on the Northeast Corridor between Boston, NYC, and DC. They were characterized by dirt cheap fares, shady business operations, and little regard for safety. They existed in a different regulatory universe than the major players at the time (Greyhound!), but still competed for the same passengers. Despite originally only existing within a small ethnic enclave to serve that specific community, it didn't take long for others to catch on. Greyhound's market share on the corridor collapsed, and a seismic shift had begun.
I liken it to a concept I learned in biology class: ecological succession. In ecological succession, after a natural disaster or similar event, different waves of organisms will colonize and populate the land. This bus industry, hear me out, works the exact same way. The Chinatown operators were first to arrive, and now are the foreign established operators. The playing field has expanded. Europe's Megabus, a long-established operator with a frankly horrifying mascot, enters the American market, offering $1 fares and is able to deliver. Curbside's efficiency and straightforwardness make it incredibly easy for new operators to enter the market and build profit margins.
Greyhound is the last to respond, launching the short-lived Boltbus service in an attempt to capture even a bit of this market. Even with Greyhound's marketing laser focused throughout its history on low fares, it faces serious competition in a struggling market for the first time in ages.
But the industry, as a whole, is growing for the first time in many decades. In 2006, service levels began growing for the first time in over four decades, and curbside models were to thank.
Continuing on with last week's discussion on stations, what're we to do with them? These stations were centralized hubs for bus travel in cities, providing amenities that the curb never could and never will. Some places have been redeveloped, some turned into museums, while some have just sat there rotting.
Last year, though, Chicago offered a groundbreaking option: public terminals. A move made mere months ago would put Chicago's Greyhound endangered bus depot soon in the hands of the city as an asset for economic development. And I believe this is one of the keys to re-establishing bus travel as a serious option for many Americans. It's a strategy long-employed by rail -- which is, admittedly, not the perfect analog, but holds many similarities.
So, given everything, our bus industry is in an era of change. Next week's entry will be on the theory of cities, where we'll start creating recommendations to bring in a second golden era of bus travel. I'm just glad I'm out of the historical archives!
Week 5: Eyes on the Street
Welcome back. It's finally time for me to gush about Jane Jacobs, who I'd call the most important American urban reformer of the 20th century. Her most famous work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is a foundational piece of literature in modern urban planning; it was published int he context of urban renewal movements throughout the 20th century that prioritized "slum clearance" of poorer, minority, and older neighborhoods in exchange for new tower blocks. See the demolition of Boston's West End below (left: Boston's West End before demolition; right: Boston's West End after demolition -- all from West End Museum):
The Jacobs-ian viewpoint was for the retention of older, dense neighborhoods as a method of maintaining stronger community. A key principle of her reasoning was the "eyes on the street" principle: a walkable, accessible streetfront will lead to natural deterrence of crime as there is inherent trust within the local community. See where this is going?
We left off last time with a discussion on bus depots. Greyhound's bus depots were, for a long time, an American icon. These grand constructions would be symbols to appear on postcards, and (at one point) even had their own bespoke chain of in-station restaurants. They've largely been abandoned in the modern day in favor of curbside, intermodal connections to rail or local buses. The city of Chicago, however, recently took a different route, purchasing the city's bus terminal and making it public property. I believe this is key to revitalizing the intercity bus as a major part of the American transportation network.
If you recall from the very, very start of our journey, Greyhound grew as a romantic mode of transport. Film, music, and advertising gave it an image of freedom and American-ism; the loss of this luster could not be illustrated better than through the loss of the station buildings. But, alas, there are examples we can turn to on how this problem can be remedied...
Passenger railroads have always been a similar industry to the intercity bus. Both move people relatively long distances from point to point. Railroads, in the 1970s, faced a similar issue of declining revenue and increased competition from other sources (including, ironically, intercity buses). However, passenger rail was absorbed into Amtrak, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, a public corporation meant to run passenger trains.
One of Amtrak's first orders of business was to develop the Amshack (to right -- Wikimedia), a standardized national station building design. It doesn't look great, and especially not after half a century of wear and tear.
For every single Amshack that has been demolished their replacement stations almost universally now emphasize intermodal connections: that is, facilitating local, regional, and nation-wide connections.
For Greyhound's credit, it's made strides towards this. In 2011, a brand new terminal opened inside Washington, D.C.'s Union Station facilities, creating intermodal connections with DC Metrorail and Metrobus, Amtrak, and other intercity buses.
As we move onto the terrifying portion of this project where I'm to begin filming content, I also need to begin considering a coherent argument. So, then, here goes nothing: more cities need to begin treating bus terminals like public spaces, and investing in the areas around them. A law like California's SB 79, which allows higher density buildings near major transit stops, if applied to intercity bus terminals, could be incredibly beneficial to reintegrating bus terminals into the urban fabric.
One more week of a comparisons and solution-building, then it's onto the brutal ordeal of filming and editing. I've got one more month, let's make it count!
Weeks 6-7: Grab Bag
Well folks, Something Finally Happened. We are done with pure research as of this week! Now, the fun part of figuring out principal photography over the next week and spending 15 hours a day editing video for the two-three weeks after. I am a time management wunderkind.
This week was largely an attempt to tie up as many loose ends as possible while getting a head start on video production. The following headers will be an attempt to recap as much of it as possible.
Greyhound, Laidlaw, Chinatown, and bankruptcies (1990-2010)
Thank you to Tom Baker and Eli Bail from the Pacific Bus Museum for helping out massively with this part. One huge, huge problem with this era of Greyhound's history is all of the corporate mergers and divestments leading the company to constantly throw out its old archival documents. In fact, in Tom's words, lots of what Pacific Bus had in its archives was, quite literally, rescued from a trash bin. So, with everything that I could find and fact check, here goes nothing:
Approaching the 1990s, Greyhound was the flagship product for the Greyhound corporation, a huge corporate conglomerate that contained everything from meatpacking (Armour & Company), financial services (GFC), and Dial soap! In 1987, Greyhound Lines (as in, the bus company) was split off from the rest of Greyhound and taken private. Confusingly enough, these companies operated independently from each other both with the Greyhound name for several years until 1991, when Greyhound changed its name to Greyhound Dial and then to just simply Dial.
Pacific Bus provided a series of financial reports from Greyhound, GFC, and Dial around this era. In 1992, Greyhound Lines went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, emerging "BETTER THAN EVER" the year after. They were, in fact, not better than ever. CEO Frank J. Schmieder is fired in 1994 after a horrible, no-good, all-bad rollout of an airline-style seat reservation system, and Craig Lentzsch is hired to bring the company back to basics.
Greyhound is hemorrhaging money right now, still for much the same reasons as before. They offered a brand of travel that was being outpriced by airlines and outclassed by railroads on many key routes, cutting deep into their market niche. They're bought out by Canadian school bus operator Laidlaw in 1999, who, in turn, themselves go bankrupt in 2001.
It's at this point that Chinatown buses begin to take off with the rise of the internet. These bus lines have some awesome tales behind them from their early days. You'll never guess how this one ends:
These two clippings are from a 2005 Wall Street Journal article published in the Reno Gazette-Journal. These bus lines were shady operations, and I'm not saying that this murder was directly bus-related and targeted, but I'm also not saying they're not. I'm imagining a Sopranos-like show with Chinese bus line mafias all along the Northeast.
And, the rest of Chinatown's stories have been told already in previous blog entries, I do believe.
The British buses
I said to myself at the very, very start of this project that the final part would be comparative: is it only the U.S. with such a failing bus industry? Why do other countries like Mexico and the U.K. have stronger bus service?
Well, from simple intuition...
Mexico lacks an intercity rail service and as robust of a budget airline network as the U.S., with its buses also being much classier than American buses. They have first class on these buses! It's impressive.
Britain's rail is so prohibitively expensive that buses (and budget airlines) can easily sweep up budget travelers. A one-way, nonstop trip from London to Glasgow on Friday, 3 July on National Rail converted to USD is $49.12, while on RyanAir, an Irish budget airline, it sits at $32.00, and on Megabus, it goes down to $28.45. Of course, we're ignoring time and other travel considerations, but from a pure budget perspective, bus and air easily beat rail. And for shorter trips like London-Manchester, where budget airlines might not even fly, rail is $45.08 while the bus is as low as $11.94.
I want to touch up on the British bus system briefly. Their system was deregulated in 1986; unlike the U.S., Britain had a publicly owned bus network before 1991 as well. While operating costs across the whole network and bus service miles actually increased immediately after deregulation, fares and ridership fell. The deregulated bus industry simply wasn't as unchanging as the old regulated National Bus Company, and lacked a certain level of consistency that the old system had. Which, then, brings me to my final point:
Video, interviews, and frustration
I had the pleasure of interviewing Zaref Anderson, a transit planner from San Diego, niche internet microcelebrity, and a self-described "optimist" about Greyhound. He regaled me with stories about getting stuck in the Imperial Valley desert for 8 hours, threatening Greyhound with a lawsuit, and of missing buses out of Vancouver's Pacific Central terminal. And if this taught me anything, it's that riders value both cost and consistency. If you can get a Frontier flight for the same price as the bus, you're gonna take the Frontier flight because chances are it's going to be on-time, fast, and reliable, albeit mediocre. Greyhound is none of those things. When it works, Zaref told me, "Greyhound is remarkably consistent," but with a big emphasis on the when.
As I move onto the daunting task of filming anything, I need to emphasize rider consistency as a main reason to maintain these station buildings. My script has ballooned to eight pages already, so definitely I'll be taking a machete to that in the following week.
It's a long, long ride from 1916 to today, so you can leave the driving to us.
Week 8: Monitoring the Situation
We're in the trenches. It's looking grim. After about 30-40 hours of video editing, finally wrapping up research, as well as most of principal photography, I am well-poised to lock myself in my room for the next three weeks to figure out how in the world I'm gonna get this together.
I finished the final interview for video content this week. This brings us to a total of two interviews: one with Zaref Anderson, a transit planner and self-described optimist on Greyhound, and the other with Pete Pantuso, my project advisor and former industry lobbyist on Capitol Hill. They both provided somewhat differing viewpoints on Greyhound, and the industry at large's current positioning and trajectory; Pantuso's was much more analytical in nature, dealing with affairs from a corporate, big-picture level. Curbside buses, by his perspective, were a boom for the industry in allowing bus companies the flexibility to pick up people in different places and allow smaller firms to further innovate on providing a better customer experience. Anderson drew from rider experience, on the other hand, citing fundamental problems with communication and customer service that make Greyhound such an often questionable product.
I tried to unify these two beliefs in my final script and resolution. Cities should offer one major terminal with the majority of service, with only limited service going towards suburban and exurban stops. The distance between smaller, suburban stops and major urban terminals should be substantial, too. I'll offer two examples, one that does this well and another one that does it less well:
Philadelphia, Pa., has three bus stops listed on Greyhound.com. One of them is located next to Spring Garden SEPTA station, with subway connections near the Delaware River (below). The two other ones are located on opposite sides of William H. Gray III 30th St. Station, the city's Amtrak terminal and a major commuter rail and subway hub. These three stops all serve what appear to be the same intercity bus services, sometimes with different lines, but sometimes without.
Also, Philadelphia is a city where it gets cold in the winters! Traveling by intercity bus like this should at least, in the interest of the rider, have a shelter.Washington, DC, on the other hand, houses only one intercity bus station within city limits in a large facility connected to Amtrak's Union Station. There is, technically, a "stop" located at Dupont Circle, but a cursory glance at upcoming buses indicates no buses actually use that location. All other stops in the DC metro are located in towns near the Beltway: Bethesda, Md., College Park, Md., and Tysons, Va., all have their own stops with less frequent service to the city center. Philadelphia has one: King of Prussia, home to its eponymous mall.
It should go without saying that city center stations need to keep terminals. Transferring between services will take you to these city center stations; if you're traveling between, say, Sioux Falls, S.D., and Fort Wayne, Ind., in the dead of winter, Greyhound.com gives you itineraries that could potentially force transfers in places like Kansas City and Minneapolis in the middle of the night. When it gets cold.
It's going to be a long week of video editing ahead. I don't expect things to be pretty, but it should be coherent and presentable. Which, frankly, it might be. I'd give it 2/3 odds of being nice and polished.
Week 9: Trenches I
It's not easy to write a blog on the pure act of editing video. Let's try anyways.
Blender, computer graphics, and bodging
This project is due in 13 days from the time I am writing this. This is not enough time for me to make high quality animations in Blender. Therefore, we will not be doing that. Eye-testing will have to do, and the concept of "bodging" will come into play: using whatever resources I can to make a fast, cheap, but not necessarily clean solution to a problem.
A portion of my animation consisted of a chart of intercity bus ridership. It's meant to animate in three segments: one being up to 1942, a second one up to 1944, and a third through the 1970s. There is a way to do this properly, I'm sure. But I have resolved to use my software like a caveman, so I drew the graph in Google Sheets, exported it as an SVG into Affinity Designer, and then re-exported it with all the necessary aesthetic and visual changes to make it consistent with what I wanted from it. This was then placed into Blender as separate mesh objects to represent each segment, manually animated to appear properly on screen.
It is not a pretty solution. It works (somewhat?) in animation, but what matters is that it works enough to fly decently well and that's what matters.
Audio and video
Let me be honest: it's not going amazingly. I have about 10 minutes of raw video footage I need to edit and mix the audio for, mainly from a trip to Sacramento last week to shoot on-location in front of the Greyhound terminal. The trip revolved around documenting development/the lack thereof in the Railyards and River Districts, just to the north of downtown Sacramento, exactly where the Greyhound station is located. This is meant to serve as a strong model for cities looking to find proper use out of intercity bus terminals: they need to be functional hubs for both transit and development alike.
This conundrum is then paired with a half-completed and inconsistent audio track recorded from my mother's closet. I haven't even begun to clean the audio there; I hope it won't end up coming down to simply taking it raw and throwing it into the editor and praying it all works out.
Visually, I should be okay on the computer graphics front. I likely won't need Blender again (phew!) for any part of this, as the second portion should be better done with images, quotes, interview clips, and the like. And following that, it should all be video filmed on-location.
With all the above being said, I am, frankly, incredibly worried for the sanctity of this project and for my own sanity.
Week 10: Trenches II, and some final thoughts
As of 7 PM on Sunday, May 10th, this project is, at long last, complete and uploaded to the internet. You can view it here.
Thank you for your continued patronage. It's been a very, very long week and a half since we last met, but this project is finally complete. My final strategies turned to using Blender's built-in camera for as many different animated portions as possible instead of relying on stacking images in a video editor with transitions and the like. This turned out to, surprisingly, be a much, much faster method than simply doing everything in the video editor. Who would've known?
Copyright has become a small issue, as a few of the archival videos and news clippings I use are of questionable status. I believe my work falls under "transformative" in fair use law, but I've placed my video as unlisted just to save the potential trouble. There's a reference to Always Sunny in there that I'm deeply, deeply proud of and which I really do not want to have to remove.
The audio mixing in much of the video is strange. I sincerely apologize and attribute this to my lack of knowledge on how to even out audio. I tried very hard on the motion graphics, and most of the production time went into that over audio mixing. The audio itself was recorded in six different sessions using all slightly different setups in the closet, which, in hindsight, was not a good idea. This should, though, still provide at least a decent viewer experience, if not a little bit frustrating at most.
There are also a few factual clarifications I have to address in the video:
At 1:25, I describe Greyhound as carrying a "commanding majority" of early intercity bus passengers. While Greyhound did carry a significant proportion, at this point in time it was neither commanding and unlikely a majority (there were not clear numbers in any of my sources).
At 6:44, when describing the Laidlaw acquisition, their actual cost was $650 million. The number $470 million came from purely Greyhound's stock.
At 11:52, "40% of counties" should be "40% of rural counties," as the screenshot indicates. My fault for not proofreading this one.
At 12:44, Oregon's POINT buses were not as strongly affected by the state legislature's failure to pass a transportation bill. TriMet, the regional operator of buses and trams in the Portland area, bore the brunt of that funding gap.
Citations will be coming in the video description as soon as I can organize them. Which, hopefully, will be within the next couple days.
Week 11: Debrief
This entry is a hodgepodge of non-video related things, intended as a corollary to the prior entry, Week 10. What did I leave out? What would I have done differently?
Cut for time
I would have loved to tell a story on Greyhound's strange corporate amalgamations and the specific reasons for its bankruptcy in the early 90s. It was, in the end, not integral to the main plot point or argument. As elaborated on previously, Greyhound Dial held assets all the way from bus travel to meatpacking to financial services, and exploded in beautiful fashion in the 90s.
Terminals, as a concept for bus travel, were widely maligned for most of Greyhound's history. The earliest complaints I had found on this were from around the immediate post-World War II, with the mian arguments being the terminals were terrible places for passengers but important for operators and parcel services. It's hard to explain why publicly owned infrastructure makes for higher quality travel than existing terminals have been doing, and much of the context that would have made that point be clearer was cut in the end.
Chinatown buses have a slew of fascinating stories on them that I had barely even touched on. Personally, their rise (and, nowadays, fall) could have made for a completely independent project and rabbit-hole in and of itself. These lines have been, in more recent years, acquired slowly by the larger companies. One morbidly hilarious article title originated from Lucky Star, a Chinatown bus line, and its federal shutdown:
Boston-based bus company Lucky Star declared an Imminent Hazard to the Public, Ordered by USDOT to Cease Operations
And this, I feel, describes so much of the vibe of Chinatown buses.
On production
There were a slew of interviews I could not get for this project, for one reason or another. Dr. Joe Schwieterman, the leading academic researcher on intercity bus lines, is an outspoken advocate for retaining bus terminals on the national network. He never responded to my calls for an interview, unfortunately. Alex Berardi is a current marketing executive at Trailways of New York, and did not respond to my call for an interview.
Research-wise, I should have contacted Pacific Bus earlier and tried to get a sit-down interview with Eli Bail, their main Pacific Greyhound expert. Their archive is immense, and I believe if I had a few less stressful weeks to flip through it and digitize whatever necessary, this project's historical portion and context could have been much clearer.
If I had given myself more time to complete the video, the very first thing I would have done is run the script a few times by my advisors and resources to check for inaccuracies. There were a few final mistakes, as indicated in Week 10's blog, that frustrate me deeply looking back. Audio production, too, is something I should have cared more about. This is elaborated on in greater detail in Week 10's blog
Some final thoughts
I believe this is the very last time I will be updating this project. It's been an honor to pour time into understanding such a strange and wonderful part of the American transportation network, and I hope to see you again on the road sometime soon.