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.)
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.