When I moved to Toronto from Edmonton -- back in the 90s .com boom -- I did it via Greyhound. Under $100 to make it across the country, with all my vinyl records and a few other possessions in boxes under the bus. 50+ hours, reading Dune while popping sleeping pills and muscle relaxants to stay sedated and comfortable, most of that in the wide swathes of northern Ontario... lakes, trees, rocks, lakes, trees rocks, repeat.
Can't say it is the best of memories, but pretty profound ones. It was my future wife (then a good friend) who met me at the bus station off Dundas Street.
I love this excerpt of your life. I was pretty young at that point, but had similar experiences (though shorter trips) going up and down BC as a teenager. Instead of techno records I had CDs in a case on my lap. Eventually (after 4 or 5 years) someone was decapitated on a bus and my parents insisted I take a car. Strange times and a much worse ending than yours.
I'm sometimes nostalgic for the trees, rocks, lakes, etc. No concerns other than my discman running out of batteries or running out of change for drinks at bus stop vending machines.
edit: Remembering now that toward the end I had an iPod mini. That would have been 2008. The problem with the iPod was that you couldn't swap batteries.
And your comment brought back memories for me, too. For various reasons when I was young I had to fly internationally a lot, and I have memories of endless hours sitting in dark cabins listening to the CDs I'd bought in the previous country, checking my precious supply of AAs and drinking every coke in the plane. Or the hours spent waiting for connecting flights in dim airports, again with nothing but my trusty discman for company. Damn I loved that discman!
I think it was the nostalgia for endless travel that led me to book a 7-day rail pass in Japan a few years ago, and spend the entire week just catching trains to nowhere, staying a few hours, and catching them back - spending the entire trip just staring out the window as the countryside flew past at 300kph. In many ways I can't remember ever feeling more relaxed.
Wow, that really does sound incredibly relaxing. Coincidentally, before my first child was born, I was planning to take my bike to Japan and ride/rail around doing much the same. Hopefully one of these days I'll finally get to do it. Your description of it makes me want to even more.
Yup, Tim mclean was beheaded and cannibalized on the bus in 2009. Bizarrely the guy who did it was granted a full, unconditional release. He doesn't need to interact with the authorities at all, not even a once a year mental health check up or anything.
I took similar trips around that time and it was a terrific way to see the country. There are so many towns that are a few kilometers off the highway that you would never see, even in passing. Bus depots also tended to be downtown, which offered an opportunity to briefly explore the unique parts of Canadian cities during transfers or refueling stops. The passengers on the bus were also a lot more sociable, particularly in Northern Ontario.
When I planned to book a similar trip a decade later, I found that airlines were not only cheaper but Greyhound was more expensive (even after factoring in traveling to one airport and from the other). I was sad, but moved on.
A few years after that, I was planning a true cross country trip, only to discover that it was impossible since Quebec and the Atlantic provinces were served by other companies (which drives up the cost considerably). Again, sadness.
There is something else that this article neglects to mention: Greyhound also provided courier services. I wonder how this is going to impact towns where they were the only alternative to Canada Post.
To be fair it was _just_ under $100 and that was with some sort of last minute standby fare. I showed up at the station in downtown Edmonton w/ my mom, got the cheapest ticket I could, gave her a kiss, and here I am still in Ontario 19 years later, and working at Google.
None, pre-digital camera days and I never owned a film camera and didn't buy any disposables. I had very little money that I didn't spend on techno records.
British Columbia's social democratic NDP government quickly stepped in with their own bus service to serve the north though I'm not sure if it's intended to be permanent.
It could make sense for the government to step in here with a publicly owned transit service if there is a real market failure here in that it's not at all profitable to serve the sparsely populated North.
"'This is an interim solution to cover the loss of Greyhound while we work with communities,' said Transportation Minister Claire Trevena, who said B.C. Transit would be spending $2 million to operate the service starting June 4."
I'm kind of surprised they aren't making it permanent though - $2 million seems pretty cheap, and making it government-run ensures it won't be taken away again.
> I'm kind of surprised they aren't making it permanent though - $2 million seems pretty cheap, and making it government-run ensures it won't be taken away again.
Government programs start small like a foot in the door. Then they start to grow due to their very nature (provide a service with no regard for cost or return, if town B has a service then town D is also entitled to one, etc) and the argument is always that their service is indispensible.
Then of course the interests of those working for the state-controlled company also play a role, and the existence of the service starts to become a political sticking point that syphons millions each year and piles o millions more in debt.
To be fair, it has been about 90 years since the last time the Tories were elected in BC, and with no functioning Tory party in BC it doesn't seem like that will happen again any time soon.
The BC liberal party is indeed kind of a philosophical blend between the federal liberals and the federal conservatives (more like the liberals on social and environmental issues, but more like the conservatives on fiscal issues) - but no, nobody calls the BC liberal party "the Tories".
>It could make sense for the government to step in here with a publicly owned transit service if there is a real market failure here in that it's not at all profitable to serve the sparsely populated North.
If its unprofitable, maybe its a bad idea to have unused transportation. While a few buses seem like negligible damage to the environment, I imagine this greater plan is to grow these locations that are in unfavorable geographic locations. Isnt this environmentally irresponsible?
The fire department isn't profitable. Still a good idea to have it. Army's not profitable. Sidewalks aren't profitable. Don't get me started on libraries...
What's the point of money if we're only going to use it to make more of it?
robertAngst didn't say "it's unprofitable, therefore we shouldn't run it" but "it's unprofitable, therefore buses are probably running mostly empty, which is environmentally irresponsible".
It's a fair question. If the attendance is truly low, maybe a subsidized taxi service would be a better replacement, for example.
Given the typical vehicle up here in the North, if the bus has even a few people on it probably is an environmental win. Generally if a person is needed up here then a person will go down and get that person and return with them. Cars are less common than trucks and a "small" truck is a 1/4 ton. Additionally, the greyhound is a popular shipping choice for industry because of the time to ship. Most of the packages/mail gets sorted in Vancouver and then returns back up to Prince George. Putting on the Greyhound and it getting to where it needs to go next day was amazing. Shipping times were often better from Alberta and BC with the major players since the package didn't have to double back. Hotshot services are typically field based, but it isn't rare for somebody to hot shot packages between cities since it can take days through other methods now.
It's good for everyone to do their part, but a few buses probably don't make a significant impact compared to their utility, even when lightly loaded.
Remember that something like 80% of global pollution comes from industry. Focusing too hard on individual vehicles is a smokescreen--even if every driver in the world switched to electric cars/trucks/buses tomorrow, it wouldn't make much difference by itself.
Can't the buses be tailored to the expected traffic ?
For instance having it be closer to a taxi service with small vehicles when there's low usage and only run big buses on commuting hours or other high usage time, for instance.
Cost and environment impact are legitimate questions, I think there are decent solutions.
This is exactly what is happening in Saskatchewan at the moment. A few smaller transport companies have started operating routes using passenger vans. They currently serve a good chunk (not nearly as much as STC, but they’re still a new player). Greyhound wasn’t the loss here, STC was as it served many communities that would have been isolated if you cannot drive. I’m proud to see a service like the Rider Express try to fill the gap
The article points out that some people have to live there due to local employment.
Having unsustainably small communities is probably less environmentally friendly than growing them to a size where not all services / materials need to be individually imported.
Greyhound didn’t innovate. The buses look like they are super old. No wifi. Exorbitant prices. It’s a terrible experience. Pay a bit more and you can take a train.
I’ve been on a government bus in Thailand. The seat reclines into almost laying position, comes with built in massager, video games and stewardess service. The cost of non-stop 9 hour ride was $20.
> Greyhound didn’t innovate. The buses look like they are super old. No wifi. Exorbitant prices. It’s a terrible experience. Pay a bit more and you can take a train.
I don't think this is salient to the discussion specifically of Greyhound shuttering service in rural Canada. There are no train lines that operate connecting most of the outposts described in the article to urban areas.
To add to that, in some places there were both bus and trains and first the train lines were shut to passengers and then the bus service decreased until it was unattractive, and then they shut the bus lines. Specific example that I know of is Acadian Lines operations in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick(1).
The availability of hugely subsidised gas and automobiles has seen people hoodwinked into taking their lives in their hands by driving insanely long distances in frequently dangerous weather. It is all part of costs being displaced onto individuals (who often welcome the displacement as they believe it increases their freedom). Some of those costs are of course also externalized into environmental impacts.
I'd come at this from the opposite perspective: being reliant on bus/train companies that can stop serving your town is exactly why an automobile is valuable and essential to anyone not living in a city.
I don't see how this is relevant to the context of the reply. It was the grandparent post who said "an automobile is valuable and essential to anyone not living in a city". If there's no access to gasoline and the roads aren't passable, then it's not that valuable in the first place.
In any case, I'm pretty sure a bus needs the roads to be passable as well.
No, just some things that you want to think about before you drive on the Trans-Canada in the middle of January.
I mean, you don't need to think about them for very long, but you do want to have a plan for being stuck for hours, or having to turn around in the middle of Nowhere, BC.
this is asinine. firstly what relative purchasing power of 9$ in Thailand vs Canada? secondly in developing countries the market for bus transport is enormous because only very wealthy have cars.
Maybe in some cases, but I've taken multiple hours long buses in Taiwan and multiple hours-long buses here in Canada and price and quality of Canadian buses is way behind the times; inconvenient, expensive, and slow.
And Taiwanese were also able to build a high speed train in mountainous, very seismicacally active terrain. We can’t seem to figure this out in flatlands.
According to [1] in the UK the major cost is employees - which make up 61% of costs, while fuel makes up 13% of costs.
Obviously, rural vs urban and local prevailing wages would mean this varies between locations - but I doubt Canadian wages are much different to those in the UK.
I think the biggest issue is that the whole process of getting on the bus is terrible. I took a Greyhound from New York, and it was just a disorganized mess the entire time. I waited in a line for over something like 45 minutes to get my luggage tagged, and there were only 20 people in front of me in line. And then when I went to line up for the bus, there were no actual lineups formed, just a mass of people, each waiting for different buses, all crammed into the same place. When I finally got on the bus, it turns out that we had to switch buses part way through, which wasn't on the ticket, so I got bumped and had to wait another hour or two for the next bus, which ended up going a longer route and taking at least an hour longer.
Maybe Greyhound elsewhere is different, but for me the entire experience was a nightmare. I took greyhound instead of a plane to save a little money, but I would gladly pay $100 extra just to avoid the whole mess of getting signed in and on the bus.
hmm? whens' the last time you took one? They've revamped their fleet and many routes do have wifi and power outlets. Granted, the wifi isn't great, but it did work.
> Greyhound didn’t innovate. The buses look like they are super old. No wifi. Exorbitant prices. It’s a terrible experience. Pay a bit more and you can take a train.
It may have been an isolated incident, but the Greyhound bus driver I had the last time seemed to have a really sour attitude and was not helpful at all.
Greyhound actually were handicapped when they got started decades ago as GM deliberately downgraded the comfort on the buses they sold.
The business logic for this made sense in a way - GM like to sell lots of cars that have to be replaced every few years rather than a small quantity of buses/coaches that are engineered to provide years of reliable service.
Once the market had been nobbled this way the passenger numbers dropped meaning that no capital was available for better buses/coaches. So there may be reasons from fifty years ago that led to your observation.
Vince Li, who now goes by the name Will Baker, beheaded and cannibalized a fellow passenger, 22-year-old Tim McLean, on a Greyhound bus that was bound for Winnipeg on July 30, 2008.
Li was charged with second-degree murder, but was found not criminally responsible for his actions. Li is a schizophrenic, but had not been taking his medication.
He has since received a full discharge from the mental hospital in Selkirk, Man., where he was being held
Not sure about Canada, but in the US the Chinatown busses have impacted the formerly very profitable routes to many destinations.
A legit company has to expend money on maintenance, etc, while the quasi-legal busses are fairly unsafe and fuel all sorts of illegal and quasi-legal activity.
Anecdotally (15 years of riding buses up and down the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic), I've never noticed a big difference in driver quality or safe driving practices between Chinatown buses and the big names.
Then again, I have no idea how well they maintain their buses.
I’m close to folks who interact with trucks and buses on a regulatory level. Many were death traps (50-75% defective brakes, unlicensed drivers, broken suspension) until major operators were shut down from 2013-2014. Now you need to be cautious of the unbranded buses as they get passed between shell companies to avoid trouble.
I think the reason is just that modern times has people needing to travel less. And there's a critical point where it's no longer profitable to run a bus at all.
People are traveling more, not less. But bus service has to compete against cars, planes, and possibly trains.
In these rural parts of Canada, it's not that the average person is traveling less, it's more that there are fewer people there and more of those who remain have their own transportation.
tl;dr greyhound causes their own problems with poor service and little to no respect for customers.
pure anecdotal but I tried greyhound awhile back. I wanted to go pick up a motorcycle in another state and figured, why not go by bus.
first rule I found out is, never go through a hub and never on a route you have to switch buses. in one of their largest hubs they overbooked and they did this regularly. which meant we had to wait for another bus to arrive. well not knowing the game I missed that one and had to wait for the third and then fourth. except the fourth was not but half full so they would not send it till the next scheduled morning run. seriously, they trapped half of us at the station because they unloaded us which means fight your way to the front.
talking to some long term bus riders and it was evident this is how the company operates. after loss of their only real competition they had no reason to change because more of their customers are too poor to have alternatives or complain.
I ended up doing a one way rental which oddly was less in cost than a bus drive and this included paying my gas and rental costs.
I don't think even if Greyhound offered better service and buses that it would make them any more money. It's a market where the customers don't have money to spend in the first place, you would be trying to squeeze water from a stone. There's not much barrier to entry, so if there were profits to be made by offering better service, another company would have entered it.
It might be doable between a few close urban cities like Megabus did, but buses in general aren't going to be a big opportunity for making money simply because too many of the the customers don't have money.
In the US, private operators of rural intercity bus service are eligible to receive operating subsidies under 49 § USC 5311(f). [1] Greyhound has written a manual for state and local governments that want to apply for a Section 5311(f) grant to fund Greyhound service. [2]
>> Greyhound’s decision to write off much of the Canadian frontier
Frontier? This isn't 1827. If Canada has a frontier it is The North, not Alberta.
Canada has significant problems when it comes to servicing small rural communities. Take the 82 year-old "cattle and grain farmer from Langenburg, Saskatchewan" who lives 11 hours outside Edmonton. Getting him health care is a huge problem, a much greater issue than him visiting relatives in the city. Greyhound didn't just disconnect small towns. It disconnected Vancouver form Kamloops, two large urban areas. It just disconnected Vancouver from Whistler.
Those two cities hosted the 2010 winter games. If that link cannot be made profitable, there is no hope for connecting Langenburg.
(I took the Vancouver-Whistler route many times as a kid. It was horrible. Four hours in a bus station and then a horrible bus to complete a journey that could be done in an hour by car. When I turned 16 I bought a car and never looked back.)
Last time i took the vancouver-whistler route it was an hour and a half - two hours or so on the bus and like 20 minutes wait at the station on main st. This was 2 or 3 years ago now.
But oh man were the greyhound staff ever rude and because the first driver on the way out half tore my return ticket i had to beg the driver in whistler in let me on the bus with the ticket i had. He was really close to making me go buy a new ticket even after explaining. There was also only 2 or 3 departure times both ways.
I personally saw this behavior in greyhound lines, and it wasn't even an outlier, it seemed to be the modus operandi. I thought it was horrible at the time and made me never want to ride the bus again. In fact, I avoided it as best I could.
It does seem weird for them to drop perfectly good routes like Vancouver-Whistler, but it makes sense when they're shuttering their whole western operations. I think it's still alright, gives the chance for a new company to come in and fulfil that demand.
Can Flix help?[1]. New investment, renewed vigour to innovate. If they can convert a good percentage of people who would now take their car because Greyhound's are so uncomfortable, they maybe profitable in these rural routes.
It's unclear how much the bus was losing per year per person potentially served. Also, instead of traveling cross country all the way by bus, why can't they just keep a feeder pattern to big cities once every few days. That should save money. The goal should be provide transportation where there isn't something else, not independently cover the country.
This basically mimics the decline of most rural areas in the US as well as parts of Europe. Declining services, population and job opportunities, even to the point where there's a marked difference in life expectancy. Unfortunately the future of the world seems like it's city based.
Unfortunate, in your opinion. Personally, I love dense cities and really dislike suburban and rural living. Everything is so convenient and there is always something to do that doesn't require driving for 20+ minutes.
It's also more sustainable. Especially the suburbs only work financially because all the infrastructure is subsidized by the urban core. On top of that public transit which is a lot better for the environment is much more viable in a proper city.
The past of the world was city based as well. Low-density human settlement as the norm is, at least for now, unsustainable. We are living in an experiment.
One of the strangest business practices Greyhound has is the $18 Gift Ticket Fee [1]. Want someone to buy a ticket for you online? That will cost an extra. Think you can avoid it buy going to the station and buying it in person? Nope, the fee still applies.
I'm surprised our federal government didn't offer to heavily subsidize the bus routes.
There really isn't any other way to travel across Canada at a fair price anymore.
We subsidize almost all forms of transportation, from the tiny GO railway system in the GTA at $2/ride, to VIA rail's cross-country treks at hundreds of dollars per ride.
Perhaps the numbers are really that dismal that subsidies didn't even make sense?
> Perhaps the numbers are really that dismal that subsidies didn't even make sense?
There's the question!
I also wonder if it isn't a chicken-egg problem. Or maybe I should call it a Field of Dreams problem (if you build it, they will come).
It would be a boon to living in this country if it were easier to travel without spending large amounts on flights. I'd certainly see more of it, myself.
The fact that travel is so expensive or prohibitive can be pretty isolating. My own family lives but two hours away (in rural ON) and I see some of them maybe three times a year. My girlfriend's family is in Victoria (BC) and she sees them more often than that these days...
GO is distance-based, though the fare is fixed to the TTC fare within the borders of Toronto ($3.75). This was part of an effort to encourage people to use existing infrastructure and take the load off the TTC.
I'm Canadian, and I tried taking a greyhound bus from Chicago to Detroit. I travelled all over the world, and apart from childhood memories of communism, and my recent visit to India. Never had I seen so much disorganization. The bus station was totally overcrowded, with confused passengers. The attendants were screaming into the PA and it was hard to discern which bus line was for which bus over all the peaking and distortion. So I got in the information line, so I could know which ticket line to get into, so I could get into the right line for my bus. So many lines, and its going slow, and I know my bus will leave in an hour. I'm waiting impatiently, soon I'll be next. What happened next, was a Kafkaesque moment. I literally saw a guy get escorted out of the "Information" line for asking a benign question, one too many times. There was a cop already there outside, seemingly ready for such moments. And promptly put cuffs on the guy. When I asked if I could still catch my bus, I was told "I was bamboozled", and laughed at. I was confused, not wanting to argue, I stepped out of the line. Bathroom smelled of urine and vomit. It was mostly poor black people at that Greyhound station, being treated terribly by other black people.
I missed my bus, and ended up booking a Megabus, 6 hours later. It was a 5 hour trip, my lower back took a beating sitting over a wheel well.
Never again.
If you're rich and want to check your privilege, and have a lower class, "Coming to America", kind of experience. Try taking a Greyhound Bus in Chicago. Highly recommend it for that purpose.
Always take the Amtrak train between Chicago and Detroit - so much nicer and easier. In my opinion, better than a car on a long weekend when the roads are jammed.
I used to take Grayhound to college. I have much less nostalgia. I remember them as long rides in very smelly buses, that usually had a start or stop is a very seedy neighborhood.
> Some analysts see it as yet another indicator that rural Canada is not only struggling, but slowly decoupling from the country’s thriving urban cores.
Sad story heard in a lot of towns around the US as well. What can a town do when all manufacturing/blue collar work was offshored a decade ago? And people think Russian Facebook ads are what propelled Trump to the whitehouse.
Does The Guardian have any kind of political agenda in writing articles of this kind? For example, "encourage left-leaning folks to remain on the island instead of brexiting over to Canada" or something like that. I don't have a dog in the fight; was just curious given how much nation-on-nation journalism (even in the commonwealth) is political or agenda-motivated nowadays.
I mean, I can't say I know, but what about this particular article raises that question? They write about issues from all over the world[1], this doesn't seem any different. Plus I doubt most "brexit refugees" were planning on eloping to isolated regions of Canada.
Plus I doubt most "brexit refugees" were planning on eloping to isolated regions of Canada
You'd be surprised how appealing BC looks to some of us here. Mind you, it (BC) looks bloody gorgeous all the time but as you say Brexit has nothing to do with the big country.
It’s no longer the Manchester Guardian. It’s positioned as a global English language newspaper. Coverage of domestic issues in Australia, the US and Canada, at least, is routine.
So is population dropping? Or just ridership? Or did Greyhound suddenly have higher costs? None of that is answered in the article, unless I missed it.
<speculation:>
I assume operating such a bus line is not all that expensive, and costs shouldn't have been rising because fuel is still cheap.
So ridership must have been dropping.
So apparently they didn't need it all that much, otherwise enough people would have continued riding so that it would have stayed profitable.
That's the morale I guess: if you value something use it more often.
Thanks for not understanding the problem and making a trite snipe at the rural people of Canada.
People who live in these places do absolutely use these buses, and some people do need them, but (while I'm not sure about service cost) the prices go up regularly, many buses are packed, slow, and chronically late, and the population is in fact falling dramatically in rural Canada as the elderly move to care homes in the cities where their children already live -- it's not necessarily about choice, but about demographic and geographic change over decades.
If there is a moral here it is not "use it or lose it". Perhaps instead it is merely that we won't be able to rely on even the services we feel are essential, as the world changes around us over time.
One packed bus does not make a service, if it's unreliable. And over those distances, they may not be profitable at the ticket prices they charge. And they may not be commercially viable if the ticket has to recoup all the costs + profit.
That's why, sometimes governments operate services, even at a loss, as a benefit, to their citizens.
Can't say it is the best of memories, but pretty profound ones. It was my future wife (then a good friend) who met me at the bus station off Dundas Street.