I'm not sure that Greyhound needs large bus terminals.
A couple years ago, a canceled Amtrak necessitated me taking a very long Greyhound ride. I started at the Greyhound station in LA and got dropped off at a McDonalds in the very small town of Lordsburg New Mexico.
Other than one bus transfer in Tucson all the stops were at gas stations or parking lots. Their terminals were actually much worse stops because people tended to congregate there and Greyhounds attract an interesting group of people.
It was a horrible experience overall, but the stops were very much not the problem.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but there is something to be said for considering this critical infrastructure. If the bus stops are going to be strip mined for the real estate value, then there should be some sort of agreement to find better termination points for this transit. In Chicago, Union Station and both Ohare and Midway airports come to mind, as they are multi modal and also have taxi and public transportation systems plugged into them already. You can hop on the blue line at Ohare or the orange line at Midway. Union Station plugs into Metra and Amtrak.
If America has traditionally relied on the private sector for this (robust bus terminal hubs), we’ll have to revisit the public sector delivering in its place. “Minimum Viable Infrastructure” or something like that.
Greyhound/bus customers do not want Ohare as the terminal. If they could afford a plane ticket they would just get on a plane, they don't want high priced parking. (there is still an hour through security, but they are already at the airport so time to get to the airport no longer counts).
If they have access to good transit then they want the bus to pick them up with only a few transfers needed on local transit. Otherwise they want easy access for cars and free parking. Most places in the US do not have good transit options so that puts us into car territory and downtown generally has terrible car access. (Of course you used Chicago as an example - one of the few exceptions)
I routinely take a suburban or regional bus to and from O'Hare. It's way better than driving/parking and a Lyft from the suburbs automatically costs at least 50$, and I don't really give a damn about easy car access since I don't have one anyway. Incidentally, most American airports where I've ever looked do have decent bus service with or without a rail transit system, you just have to look/ask for it.
> If they could afford a plane ticket they would just get on a plane
For destinations with major airports it appears to be cheaper to fly than to bus, and that's before you consider the fact that a 24 hour drive with multiple transfers is only a few hour flight.
The reason people are taking Greyhounds is because they're going somewhere that other transportation doesn't serve.
A bus company that arranges "virtual stations" with restaurants, gas stations, etc., will be less capital intensive and more flexible than one that builds out static infrastructure. That doesn't prevent partnerships for multimodal.
It depends on the motivation. Business decisions focused only on minimizing cost usually mean they choose to sacrifice quality. If an ad hoc network of locations is setup to enlarge the network, provide flexibility, or keep quality high it's a good sign.
Greyhound is stuck as the transportation method of last resort. They are known for providing uncomfortable and slow trips so they cannot attract the type of customer who will pay more, which leaves them unable to invest in a better experience.
How do we continue to serve a transportation consumer population that can only afford bus tickets?
If we decide to continue to serve this population, how do we do it in a manner consistent with developed world standards?
If the zombie must die to be reborn, reasonable. But to double tap it in the head and these people go without long haul transportation seems untenable. And high speed rail isn’t getting built any sooner than a decade from now. In the meantime, those not of means need long haul transportation to be solved for.
> How do we continue to serve a transportation consumer population that can only afford bus tickets?
Where there's demand, there will be some service to substitute.
In college and early in my career, I was too cheap to buy a flight ticket to NYC and too disorganized to book an Amtrak ahead of time, so I'd use the Vietnamese and Chinatown buses. Banh Mi was included.
Most Little Saigons and Chinatowns are connected to each other by ethnic community run bus companies. They're a fraction of the price of a Greyhound and much cleaner.
Low Income Latino and (back in Canada) Punjabi communities also have similar businesses running.
So an intractable maze of tiny, locally run transport services (all separate and disconnected of course) along with a huge portion of hope that someone will build something.
I don't know, but I wouldn't want to plan a trip, let alone a commute in that kind of environment.
I had a layover of several hours in the middle of the night, in the dead of winter in Indiana, and it was very, very nice to have terminal to wait around in. The only thing open for a couple of blocks was a White Castle. If I had to hunker down for four hours outside in the snow, with everything closed, in sneakers and a light jacket, it would have been pretty rough.
The newer Flixbus service does not seem to believe they need terminals; their Seattle-bound buses simply pull up to the curb on a particular side street in Chinatown. It's a reasonable location, close to city transit stops and not far from the Amtrak station, but the only permanent infrastructure is a plain white sign reserving the spot for "charter bus" parking. I walked by the spot every day for a couple of weeks before I had any idea it served as a bus terminal!
Going to their website and comparing it to Greyhound it appears that both of these services offer the same exact busses with the exact same prices. The websites are even identical. Are you certain this is a new service and not just a greyhound reseller or rebadged greyhound offering?
You started at a Greyhound station in LA (that you probably could have gotten to via public transportation, but maybe you live near there or were close enough to uber or take a taxi) & were let out at a restaurant which, according to google maps, is a 10 minute walk from hotels, city hall and other points of interest. As horrible as your experience was, it was much better than what is being described in the article & what many riders have to go through.
I don’t think he was complaining about the stations so much as the experience of riding a greyhound. Greyhound buses are invariably unpleasant in a variety of ways in my experience.
My experience at the LA Greyhound station was pretty miserable. It would have been just as good had it been at an existing train station, gas station, or somewhere else that is also reachable by public transit.
they really do need terminals at interchanges. not so much at the stops that are just stops.
i used to take greyhound pretty frequently on one of these gas-station milk runs, and it worked okay. but when you've got a place where multiple routes converge, you've got to have some way to handle the scenario where bus A doesn't arrive at the exact same time as bus B or bus C. and beyond that, not having a comfortable and safe place to wait just ensures that bus service is only used by people who don't have any better option.
Yes, people much prefer being dropped off in the parking lot of a smoke shop than an official terminal or building.
It's also a great point that if it is an official building, the people who get on and off Greyhounds (who you don't like) will be there. But if it's not an official building, they won't ever find out that's where the Greyhounds are at, so they won't be there.
I suppose since clean and secure drop off and pick up spots are completely out the window, the best solution is just to use some other miscellaneous location that can never be clean and/or secure.
The greyhound terminals I've been to have been worse than a smoke shop. They were in run down locations in the bad part of downtown - well most US downtowns are bad parts of town after dark as they focus so much on office work that nobody is there after 6pm.
Terminals are pretty important for transfers if it's a hub.
It's probably no coincidence that Los Angeles has a terminal and Lordsburg, New Mexico doesn't.
If you're going from Las Vegas, NV to Palm Springs, CA, there are no direct Greyhound routes (that I could find). You're going to go to a hub city (like LA), get off the bus, and sit in the terminal a while before you board another bus. McDonald's doesn't want you doing that, and McDonald's might not even be open.
However, Greyhound could save money on real estate by moving hubs to the suburbs. They could still have stops downtown in big cities, but have the bigger facility where land is cheaper.
Travel YouTuber Noel Philips documented his experience on a long distance greyhound journey published a couple of weeks ago. ("I spent 5 Days on America's Longest Greyhound Bus. It was hell." [1]). Noel expressed huge empathy for the folks he shared the journey with recognizing that here is a desperate need for Greyhound's services, their customers tend to come from low/no income backgrounds and the company by and large treats them with contempt.
I did a 5 day trip on greyhound twice as a teenager. Once the southern route (from Vicksburg to Seattle via LA and through Texas and Arizona) and once the northern route (from Vicksburg to Seattle via Chicago and through Montana).
The bus stopped at every prison on the route, and the prisoners from Texas and Arizona would get off at LA or Sacramento because they had nowhere else to go, it was sad. But mostly everyone was cool, if a bit smelly (well, I was also, not showering after a couple of days things get dank).
My dad really couldn’t resist the $60 go anywhere fare they were running at the time. It was definitely an experience though. I met some nice people, had some weird experiences, I think back on it fondly.
A friend of mine took a bus to visit me recently. He spent many extra hours because a bus driver saw someone in line smoking, then just abandoned everyone at the stop for that. Plenty of strange people demanded his seat & ticket and it wasn't any too clear that they had their own. Not to mention all the times he was left with long walks or in strange areas in the middle of the night.
> 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.
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.
I don't see the article addressing how crime and homelessness play into downtown bus transit.
Downtown greyhound terminals are the most consistently delipidated and crime prone (seeming) parts of the city.
As a poor student, I took a ton of grey hound buses and the central drop off locations always looked shady.
Big bustling cities would drop you in the middle of the city's worst poverty. While smaller crumbling cities treat the greyhound stop as homeless central.
I'll say, my experience is more so in the North East corridor which is more densely populated and the bus networks are well used.
As long as greyhound buses are the choice transportation of the drug addicted, there is no amount of sugar that will make them seem appealing.
Even as an stubborn transit user, I have sworn off intercity buses in both the US and surprisingly Europe too. Just the smell is enough of a deterrent.
No, but ignoring them gives moral satisfaction to the 'luxury liberals' who think that loudly advocating for more public spending is going to fix things. This mentality leads to the kind of reckless infrastructure spending seen in California. A model that allows you to spend billions and fix nothing, all for better optics. Sometimes it splendidly makes things worse and gives even more ammo to the "defund everything" everything brigade, making well considered public spending even more politically infeasible.
Addressing the problem head-on leads to the kind of discussions that are uncomfortable for the usually-left-leaning urban politicians and the populace. Transit and drug-addled-homelessness are sworn enemies. Good transit necessitates safety.
If there are too many homeless people in the downtown areas, should the city distribute them across the county in new homeless shelters? If the drug problem is really bad, should there be more criminal enforcement? If the bus-stops in downtown are to be useful, should we remove heavily-subsidized car infrastructure (parking minimum, free parking, massive highways) and replace it with commercial activity that benefits dense-transit ridership ?
The truth is that urban suburbs and cities vote overwhelmingly Democrat. Here, the hostile infrastructure and policies of urban US, cater to people who claim to be warriors of the left on social media. But they aren't willing to support any policies which may have real impact because it leads to minor inconveniences for those in the pretty suburbs and 'safe' neighborhoods.
There is nothing I hate more than this sort of hypocrisy. They want the moral upper-hand by claiming to care, while simultaneously blocking any policy that fixes things. It is downright evil. At the very least, the conversation has to force people into choosing moral victory or personal selfishness. I can at least respect that about the Republicans. They might cut public funding, but at least I can call them out for being selfish with no facade.
I know people who love transit but refuse to ride the BART. I know people who refuse to take the Seattle light rail into downtown because West-lake center is a total shithole. I swore off public buses despite being the kind of pro-cycling-pro-transit maximalist that veers into parody.
It is an era of peak narcissism. People most care about social optics and feeling good about themselves. In such a situation, holding a mirror up to these people is a powerful tool for affecting outcomes. I believe in carrots and sticks. For years, I tried the 'Carrot' (ie. talking about benefits and incentives). That didn't work, so now, the 'Stick' it is.
It's a chicken-and-egg/gordian knot problem isn't it? Buses are still the cheapest mode of inter-city transportation, well below airplanes and below trains (not to mention the bad state of passenger train travel in the US where buses have been left as the only non-airplane options between some major cities). As the cheapest option that should mean they have the widest audience in theory, but also as the cheapest option they have also become the only option for certain portions of the populace. In the race to the bottom of capitalism they focused too much on the cheapest passengers and lost a lot of reasons to enforce cleanliness and standards in the name of cost efficiencies.
In theory, they could try to expand back to more "premium experiences and amenities" raise some prices and try to expand from just the poorest passengers, but they risk losing the most regular passengers they have. In practice, they also always have a hard time competing with the "premium experiences" of air travel because even accounting for the time overhead of TSA and "be two hours early to be on time for your flight", buses still lose when it comes to overall travel time.
I don't think there's currently an easy market-based solution to solve the chicken-and-egg/gordian knot problem of the very ugly local maxima of poor service for the cheapest passengers only that inter-city buses currently have maximized for rather than trying again for cleaner, better inter-city buses. (Maybe it needs more public infrastructure and support; maybe it needs an entirely new competitor to shake things up, like now might just be the ripe time for the disruption of something like inter-city electric dirigibles to be a best of both worlds lower priced [especially as diesel gets more expensive], no TSA but some of the time savings of more direct air travel. That probably isn't going to happen, because this timeline isn't that cool, but we can collectively dream and there are startups on HN that think they can do some version of that disruption.)
“Last year, Alden subsidiary Twenty Lake Holdings purchased 33 Greyhound stations for $140 million. Alden is best known for buying up local newspapers like The Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and The Baltimore Sun, cutting staff, and selling some of the iconic downtown buildings.”
“Twenty Lake Holdings LLC, a subsidiary of Alden Global Capital, purchased 33 Greyhound stations from the U.K. conglomerate FirstGroup late last year.”
Next year, the youngest Boomer will turn 60 years old. As the Boomers age out of driving, the lack of other options is going to become a major political issue. The post-war babies still have enormous clout, and I highly doubt they will accept a total loss of mobility when they're no longer comfortable navigating busy stroads and highways. They will soon be the ones pushing for better intercity bus / passenger train options.
They should be, but more likely they will just push relaxing driving standards so they can continue to drive despite not being safe. Same as nearly most other retirees are doing.
Most retirees seem to drive less, but only a few have stopped. I don't think it has occurred to many that transit could be an option - unless they already live in a place where transit is useful and thus they are using it. Even then few seem to think they could get transit in other places they want to visit.
For some of them who live in certain suburbs - like Plano, TX - they've likely lived most of their adult lives without ever actually seeing public transportation, much less using it.
Accident rates per mile bottom out during people's 60s and then rise again. Drivers 85+ are involved in accidents at rates similar to drivers in their 20s.
Big difference between 60 and 85. But I do grant that at some point, people should give up driving if their vision, reaction times, cognative function, etc. do not allow them to do it safely.
Meh. I think those with means quietly vote with their feet, not quite aware of what they are doing. Have you ever been to / seen video of The Villages? Golf carts and pedestrians owning the street, with cars as guests. And this might be the most politically conservative place in America.
Yes, they probably need an at least one experience of good intercity transit before they see it is possible, but now that the Brightline is running in The Old People Holy Land of Florida, many will have it.
In my state at least, licensing requirements are already lax enough that my 94 year old relative has no problem maintaining (and, using) a valid license.
How comfortable is your 94 year-old relative on a busy interstate, or worse, a 6 lane stroad? Just because somebody still has a driver's license doesn't mean they haven't lost mobility. Now, others have pointed out that if they don't have experience taking good transit, older folks wouldn't even think of using transit as opposed to staying home, which I have to admit has a ring of truth to it.
Have you taken a Greyhound across the country? I have.
Put it this way: the boomers with clout are probably not accustomed to being around the folks that take the bus cross country. You meet people and hear stories that you wouldn't in other contexts. Whether that makes you uncomfortable or not is in you, but it's different than what I suspect most of us are used to.
> They will soon be the ones pushing for better intercity bus / passenger train options.
Nah. Boomers mostly live in the suburbs, where mass transit is never going to work because there isn't enough density. But it's common for retirees to move once they no longer have any need to live within reasonable commuting distance of work and no longer need the three bedroom house because their kids have moved out. So they move to a retirement community in a low cost of living area and don't have to advocate for anything because those communities are already designed for that lifestyle.
When they want to travel between cities they'll get on a plane.
Airports are accessible via Uber, which is only a fraction of the cost of the plane ticket.
When you're visiting your kids you don't even need that on their end because they pick you up at the airport. When you're traveling the destination may not even be in the US much less the city or state where you have a vote on local transit systems.
Also, that leg of the journey is the one served by Greyhound. Either way you have to get from the bus station or airport to your ultimate destination.
Tangentially, I believe anticipating that desperate customer-base is the #1 reason of the last ~15 years of investors piling onto "self-driving car" bandwagons.
That's in contrast to the reason of "the appropriate technology finally exists to do it." Perhaps investments will _make_ the technology appear in time to catch that demographic wave... but I don't think it's guaranteed.
> "Roughly three-quarters of intercity bus riders have annual incomes of less than $40,000."
Wow. The US really has a much higher cost of living.
Here in Barcelona if you make that much you're actually making pretty good middle-class money. Most of my friends make around 25k and some even own their flat.
The idea that you're a "poor bus-rider" with "only" 40k salary... Wow.
> 38% had incomes less than $20,000. ... 18-19% of riders were found to be
unemployed.
The study is also limited to the Chicago area. As of September:
> the median rent for a one bedroom apartment in Chicago is currently $1,385, up almost 24% compared to this time last year and 10% higher than the national median.
> The average cost of a two bedroom apartment is $1,745, up nearly 30% compared to the same time last year. That price is 13% above the national median.
In USA decent food (not full of cr*p and gonna wreck your health) cost, in my experience, twice as much as UK 20 yrs ago, might be 3x now. If you need healthcare, expect big bills, even if you're insured. Many parts of USA you gotta drive everywhere, which is costly. A family might need 2 cars. Seems to me a fair proportion of the larger US salaries get swallowed up. And don't forget you have to work 40 hrs a week vs 37.5 which amounts to 2 weeks extra a year, and Americans generally get 2 weeks vacation vs in UK 4 weeks legal min, often 5 weeks or more. And US employment law is often you can get fired at the drop of a hat. Having no security like that would be called a "contractor" in UK, and compensated accordingly ;)
This seems like bad policy, because it's my prediction that highway self-driving and EV drivetrains will make intercity bussing much cheaper. The transport / fuel costs will be 1/2 to 1/3, the labor cost will probably drop from some amount of automation, and the repair/maintenance costs of EV drivetrains is a lot lower.
The recharge time isn't a big deal with passenger transport, since there is the station dropoff/pickups and the stops at places to eat.
With some degree of good highway self driving or remote driving, you could even use smaller vans that are less capital intensive. Or even an intercity car service.
I don't understand why highway self-driving would help save on costs. You would still have to exit the highway to make stops, and that means you would need a driver to be on board the whole time, right?
That can be different from supporting these terminals though. Which is why a citation would be nice: so you can drill down into why they think this is bad. Maybe you disagree, maybe you agree, but until you understand the issue you cannot form an opinion. You may even agree with all their reasoning and still favor closing the terminals because there are considerations they are not considering.
(I consider myself a transit advocate, but I'm not sure if I'll write up my thoughts: that would take a lot of time/effort to put into words. In any case you didn't ask that question)
It depends on the kind of transit advocate you are. To me it appears that with the amount of investment the government has already and continues to put into the automotive sector (building infrastructure, keeping laws that keep them pretty protected, etc), inter-city transit is handled pretty well by the private sector.
You have all sorts of private inter-city bus services (megabus, boltbus, etc. and of course the Chinatown buses that have connected Chinatowns across the country for decades) that work pretty well to keep costs down and are pretty efficient.
The government can step in to require certain minimum labor protections and safety and maintenance standards, but I don't think there's much need for govts to actually run inter-city buses.
In larger cities with a lot of buses governments should create an open bus depot where all the different private operators can rent gates (much like an airport), so there's a centralized location where services such as food, drinks, taxi services, public transport, etc., but this could very easily be a profitable venture that would not require govt. support (other than requiring inter-city buses to use the depot).
I'd rather have govt support other inter-city services where it currently does not put much investment in, such as rail.
> Why wouldn't transit advocates be in favor of more support for intercity transit?
The solution for intercity transit is obviously trains and aircraft. The primary disadvantage of intra-city trains is the expense of building a rail line to less traveled parts of a city, but nearly every city already has at least one intercity rail line.
The reason intercity passenger trains aren't more popular is that Amtrak charges almost as much as a plane ticket costs but then gets you there much slower. Which is in part caused by low ridership, which subsidies for intercity buses would only make worse.
It's not just price. Amtrak routes cover a tiny fraction of the routes that greyhound does, and likewise only a fraction of cities/towns have airports. At least in the past, Greyhound was often bundled with Amtrak to complete trips.
Many of the existing freight rail lines aren't suitable for passenger use even if there was demand to support them, and even if they were the are still tons of town with no rail passing through them. Using the highways we've already built and are going to maintain either way is more efficient than building out completely different infrastructures for public transit and personal transportation.
Eh. Amtrak has routes to most regions and Greyhound doesn't have routes to most ultimate destinations. Typical bus or train trips are you get a ride to the station from a friend or Uber and then the people you're visiting pick you up at the station on the other end. If the station on the other end is five minutes drive or fifteen minutes doesn't really matter, because it's too far to walk either way.
The problem here isn't intercity transit, it's intra-city transit. But that isn't the one Greyhound solves.
Low ridership is also the reason many cities with tracks don't have passenger routes.
No it really doesn't, and even if it passes through a region, the routes are often pathological, like in the worst case a trip from Denver to Dallas having to pass through Chicago or San Francisco.
> If the station on the other end is five minutes drive or fifteen minutes doesn't really matter, because it's too far to walk either way.
That is very minor problem compared to the issue of the nearest Amtrak stop being literally hundreds of miles further away compared to the nearest greyhound stop.
> Low ridership is also the reason many cities with tracks don't have passenger routes.
There are other reasons, in particular that running freight and passenger trains on the same rails has many scheduling issues that makes the rails worse for both users.
> No it really doesn't, and even if it passes through a region, the routes are often pathological, like in the worst case a trip from Denver to Dallas having to pass through Chicago or San Francisco.
The west is why it's "most" rather than "all" regions. But the places Amtrak doesn't go are the same places where local mass transit is abysmal or non-existent and everybody has a car. The reason there is no direct passenger route from Denver to Dallas is that anybody going there would drive or -- because everything is so spread out in the west and that's still a 12 hour drive -- fly.
> That is very minor problem compared to the issue of the nearest Amtrak stop being literally hundreds of miles further away compared to the nearest greyhound stop.
But it usually isn't, especially anywhere that anybody would be using either of these modes of transport.
Okay, so Greyhound goes to Daytona Beach and Amtrak "only" goes to DeLand, but they're <25 miles apart, and your destination may be some other town in the region rather than one where either of them have a stop.
> There are other reasons, in particular that running freight and passenger trains on the same rails has many scheduling issues that makes the rails worse for both users.
It's all down to ridership. If more people used them then you could justify more sections of parallel track that allow trains to pass each other or travel in opposite directions at the same time.
>The west is why it's "most" rather than "all" regions
Not just the west. I live in Jacksonville, FL, an 8 hour drive to New Orleans, and just 6 to Atlanta, but I'd need to go through Washington DC to get to Atlanta or through Chicago if I wanted to get to New Orleans (on a train the whole way).
They still have routes through all of those cities, and the reason it's circuitous to get from Jacksonville to New Orleans is that there's a line that goes directly there but it's suspended. They're making efforts to restore it, but the process is unsurprisingly full of politics and bureaucracy.
The line is "suspended" since Hurricane Katrina hit NO and even with the new infrastructure funding is not set to be re-opened. 18 years later it's fair to say we've moved past "suspended".
Intercity rail in the US only makes sense in a few places, mostly the corridor between Boston and DC where Amtrak operates the Acela. If Amtrak could just close down their long haul routes and operate Acela by itself, it would be profitable. There’s also Brightline between Miami and Orlando and I wish them success.
Intercity rail makes sense in a lot more places. If Amtrak was as competent as other operators around the world most of the US east of the Mississippi is similar density as Europe and could have great intercity trail.
Rail across the US doesn't not make sense. Even North South the US is too big for rail to make sense. However there are a lot of shorter trips that would make sense via rail if the network existed and had competent operations. That Amtrak only makes money on the Boston-DC routes (or so they claim) more about their bad management and decades of bad decisions to not invest in making anything else worth using.
There's a big difference between "Amtrak's current long-haul routes do not turn a profit" and "intercity rail in the US only makes sense in the Northeast Corridor." There are many metropolitan areas in America that are separated by only a few hundred miles, a very normal and natural distance for a train route. The problem is that Amtrak doesn't currently connect those cities, and/or doesn't run enough service to make those trips viable.
For example, the Cleveland and Pittsburgh metro areas are over 2 million and just over 3 hours apart by train or car. However, there is currently only one train from Cleveland to Pittsburgh a day, and it leaves at 1:54 AM. Obviously, most people will drive if that's the only alternative, but that does not say much about the general viability of inter-urban rail between those two cities.
I never said intercity rail in the US only makes sense in the Northeast Corridor. I think it makes the most sense there but there might be other viable routes. I even mentioned Brightline as another example.
Feel free to read “mostly” for “only” in my response, then. My point is still that even outside of Brightline (East — there’s also Brightline West, LA to Vegas) and the NEC, there are actually a lot of city clusters and corridors in America that would be an appropriate distance and population for reasonably high-ridership train travel. There are clusters of cities in Texas, the Southeast, the Midwest / Rust Belt, Colorado, Northern and Southern California, and the PNW that have all been identified as good candidates for new or substantially improved service. I disagree that this constitutes just “a few places,” as you originally said.
The fact is, Acela is the only proven line. Amtrak could be profitable with enough money left over to invest in improvements if it was first reduced to Acela, but instead they are forced to waste taxpayer money on slow, unprofitable long haul routes.
It’s possible that other viable routes exist, but unfortunately the political environment makes some of them impossible to build. For example, a French railroad operator working on the California high speed rail project bailed out in 2011 due to “political dysfunction”, instead building a high speed rail line in Morocco that finished in seven years. So in some theoretical alternate universe where California was as politically functional as Morocco, maybe they could have a modern bullet train between LA and SF. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen though.
Personally I’m happy to leave the question to private investors. I wouldn’t put any money in your proposed Cleveland-Pittsburgh line but maybe you can prove me wrong. I am also dubious that Texas would be a good candidate for passenger rail; Texas has very good highway coverage and the way Texas cities are laid out, you’d need to rent a car on either end of your train journey anyway so it really makes more sense to drive.
A couple years ago, a canceled Amtrak necessitated me taking a very long Greyhound ride. I started at the Greyhound station in LA and got dropped off at a McDonalds in the very small town of Lordsburg New Mexico.
Other than one bus transfer in Tucson all the stops were at gas stations or parking lots. Their terminals were actually much worse stops because people tended to congregate there and Greyhounds attract an interesting group of people.
It was a horrible experience overall, but the stops were very much not the problem.