Bus Travel Booms
14th January 2013
“Air travel has a hassle factor. You have to turn off devices for takeoff and landing and there is often no Wi-Fi,” Schwieterman said. “On the other hand, you can get on a bus with your laptop and you’re set for the day.”
Not to mention getting your junk groped by the Post Office TSA.
“You look at the economics of single-occupant driving, and young people see it as almost ridiculous to drive long distances alone,” he said. “Gas itself is far more than the bus fare if you look at the typical price from, say, Chicago to Detroit [roughly $35 round-trip].”
And God alone knows how much it would cost by air, assuming your flight doesn’t get cancelled.
Expanding rail service, meanwhile, has been a difficult proposition in recessionary times because it requires years of planning and regulation.
And costs out the ass, usually at taxpayers’ expense, and they just aren’t willing to put up with such boondoggles any more.
“Taxpayers have been footing the bill for Amtrak’s gravy train for over 40 years, and all they’ve gotten in return for their $40 billion investment is an inefficient, costly, Soviet-style passenger rail system,” he said at a hearing in September. Former presidential nominee Mitt Romney, too, said that, if elected, he would end all U.S. taxpayer support for the railroad, which totaled roughly $1.4 billion for fiscal year 2012.
Your tax dollars at work. Private industry does things much more efficiently — after all, they actually have to make money
And then there’s the bus, which requires much less overhead, uses existing infrastructure and entails no taxpayer support.
To which politicians and the Usual Suspects in the media react like a vampire faced with holy water. What? No lucrative taxpayer-funded contracts to give out to highly-unionized, lobbyist-supporting, Democrat-donating firms? No points to be gained with the enviro-Nazis who want to cancel the 20th century? The horror! The horror!