America's Greyhound bus stations are disappearing (opens in new tab)

Yes, but also airlines will completely fail without government support. The only aspect of aviation that is private is the buying a ticket and purchasing and operating planes, creating a thin fiction of a free market. Everything else is supported. The airports, the airline manufacturers (that also make expensive weapon systems via govt. contracts), the fuel system (supported by endless diplomacy, monetary policy, and war), radar and satellite networks, subsidies when revenue can't support operations.... it goes on and on.

The airlines are critical to a big country like the US when our passenger rail networks are so slow, so the government supports it. They should also support bus networks etc. I suspect much of their road policy is designed to support Americans buying cars, the second biggest purchase next to a house that most people buy. It's very cynical.

Buses already rely on private car drivers subsidising them via road damage. Bus can do 10,000-20,000 times more damage. Extrapolate that and it’s actually cheaper to be in a taxi.

This so much. Anyone who has ever spent time having to be stuck at a Greyhound terminal in the south knows what true hell looks like. They are full of the sketchiest people of every city.

Not great places unless you are into smoking crack with homeless people and getting threatened or stabbed by them.

Making the bus more useful for more people has the opposite effect. The people who are currently on the bus are people with no other option. The population on the bus, on average, is only going to get less "undesirable" (to the HN crowd) if the bus station is nice, well-lit, comes at reasonable times, has coffee shops and stuff.

Took a bus to Atlantic City, people played music and smoked in the bus.

If no one drives me, I will never go back.

Thank you for saying this, I was hoping somebody would bring class into it. Intercity bus lines aren’t subsidized because poor people ride buses between cities, and as a society we prefer not to subsidize poor people’s physical mobility. Physical mobility is a prerequisite for social mobility, after all.

Is there some rule that CTA can’t have a station in a building with a bar? Because most of the loop subway stations skirt that pretty close.

There is a bar in the pedway between the lake redline stop and the Washington blue line stop for instance. And the merchandise mart has several bars and a brown line stop.

I’d guess that the CTA doesn’t have a presence at Union Station because of the way we carved up regional transit, not because of done alcohol policy.

Flixbus/Greyhound will do as they have done in other cities, and rent a large parking lot, plop a trailer house and a few port-a-potties and call it a station.

Generally, you split the company and the real estate. Then you force the company pay rent on the real estate. Then you jack the rental rates to extract the cash out of the company. Then you put the company into bankruptcy. Then you walk off with the real estate.

Anything with old real estate is subject to this. Massachusetts had a similar issue with selling off a bunch of the old Catholic hospitals. The company bought the hospitals, extracted the real estate, and now they're closing all the hospitals. Oops.