Actually I was wondering. Is there a way to get all the westbound and southbound bus schedules between Seattle and Portland and also the westbound ones between Portland and Spokane? Washington state, of course, has a law that allows subsidies for intercity bus services. At least it did as of the last time I checked. Vancouver, BC to Portland seems pretty much OK for bus service, but the east-west side in Washington and Oregon strikes me as very short of service. I'm trying to make sense of what's already there and what could be subsidized to, say, bring Seattle-Pasco up to at least two round trips-a-day from just one, and possible add Seattle-Ellensburg-Spokane service with transfers in Ellensburg from the Seattle-Pasco route.
If it's just for a study, it can be done by plowing through the internet with dummy itinerary searches. It's slow, because some trips are less than daily. For the reports here, I just show PDX<>SPK as a sample of what is going on east-west.
You're right about east-west service being skimpy. It was affected by discount air fares that killed most trans-continental bus travel (yes, GL used to schedule three buses a day from Chicago to Seattle via US10, plus a fourth express trip in the summer, competing against two daily NP trains).
Recently, Flix added a SEA<>SPK trip with intermediate stops in Moses Lake and Ellensburg. They had one trip doing that to start with, inherited from the last Greyhound. Oh, and Northwestern serves Moses Lake, too, but Flix is at a different gas station.
I don't know the person at WSDOT who handles intercity bus subsidies, but I suspect that Northwestern might be receiving aid for their daylight SEA<>SPK trip, which makes nine intermediate stops and runs via Stevens Pass and is in the Thruway system. And I'm sure that Greyhound is receiving aid for their twice daily runs between Port Angeles and Sea-Tac via King Street Station and the major Seattle hospitals. That one is in the Amtrak Thruway system.
Having followed this through the years, I've come to the conclusion that the best way to get improved intercity bus service is to run good train service. Then someone will try to take business away from it.
BTW, does anyone reading this know of a Flix-branded service that is in the Amtrak Thruway system?
