# BOLT hands off to Mother Greyhound



## Willbridge (Jul 4, 2021)

*BOLT (aka Greyhound) "indefinitely" ends Cascades service:*

BoltBus, the Affordable Bus Service That Would Ferry Portlanders as Far North as Vancouver, B.C., Has Shut Down Indefinitely

BoltBus

The Greyhound booking website for July 5th shows that they have added a second GL trip to SEA<>PDX. The GL website also has a page assuring BOLT customers that their accumulated points will be carried into Greyhound’s program – but not immediately. This and the absence of a service change bulletin for Table 600 showing radical changes in one of the two Sacramento<>Seattle trips suggest a hurried decision. On July 4th the NABT timetables in the extranet were mixed up (see Table 601).

NABT Guide

One thing that’s a tradition with Greyhound is setting up a specialized operation with some attractive feature and then gradually withdrawing it and folding it into their routine. In the March 1, 1974 timetables there were 4 northbound and 6 southbound “V.I.P. Executive Coach” trips between Portland and Seattle. Overall, there were 8 northbound and 7 southbound non-stop PDX<>SEA trips scheduled to make the run in 3½ hours. As locals were dropped, the bigger intermediate stops were added to the expresses and the “V.I.P. Executive Coach” tag faded out. The same thing happened to the hourly non-stop Edmonton <> Calgary buses.

BOLT buses imitated curbside operators by loading on a street near Portland Union Station but in December 2015 laid over in the modern Greyhound station. Now the Greyhound station is closed, for sale, and Greyhound is loading on a street near Portland Union Station, adjacent to newer entrant Flix.


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## flitcraft (Jul 4, 2021)

Greyhound is in a death spiral. This is just another of the spasms in that process, sadly.


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## railiner (Jul 4, 2021)

Yes...just a matter of time. Still no buyer's in sight. Up in Canada, where they've been shut down entirely, other carrier's have already filled some of the vacuum. But the days of nationwide network bus service in the USA is surely numbered....☹


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## Willbridge (Jul 4, 2021)

railiner said:


> Yes...just a matter of time. Still no buyer's in sight. Up in Canada, where they've been shut down entirely, other carrier's have already filled some of the vacuum. But the days of nationwide network bus service in the USA is surely numbered....☹


I didn't mention that the Eastern BOLT has also been "indefinitely" shut down.

The regionalization of intercity bus service in the U.S. and Canada has good and bad aspects. The good point is better scheduling for the shorter trips that are inefficient by air and long enough to be tiring by auto. The bad point is that there are cracks in the network where two regional systems don't mesh. Greyhound and Trailways used to have enough traffic to do both functions.


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## railiner (Jul 5, 2021)

Willbridge said:


> Greyhound and Trailways used to have enough traffic to do both functions.


Say what you will, but I think the decline was mainly due to deregulation, where franchises guaranteed protection from cut-throat competition, still provided reasonable fares based on mileage, not market, and "cross-subsidized" weaker branch line routes. Oh, and provided a decent wage and pension for employees.


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## TheVig (Jul 5, 2021)

I haven't been on a long haul Greyhound in many years. I've been on a few short runs between Philly and NYC, but those are mostly commuter type runs IME.

Unlike the RPA for Amtrak, I don't think there is any meaningful passenger lobbying arm for the bus industry. Not sure the average Greyhound rider, could afford reasonable yearly dues anyways. LOL. At this point, I'm not sure it's possible for Greyhound to shake off all the negative stereotypes. Too many years of being a mode of transportation, for the lowest common denominators amongst us have taken it's toll on the business and brand as a whole.


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## cirdan (Jul 5, 2021)

TheVig said:


> I haven't been on a long haul Greyhound in many years. I've been on a few short runs between Philly and NYC, but those are mostly commuter type runs IME.
> 
> Unlike the RPA for Amtrak, I don't think there is any meaningful passenger lobbying arm for the bus industry. Not sure the average Greyhound rider, could afford reasonable yearly dues anyways. LOL. At this point, I'm not sure it's possible for Greyhound to shake off all the negative stereotypes. Too many years of being a mode of transportation, for the lowest common denominators amongst us have taken it's toll on the business and brand as a whole.



I'm afraid you're probably right.

Though I would like to think there must be innumerable communities whose Greyhound service, however unglamorous, is their only connection to the outside world for those who don't drive. I would hope that politically there must be at least some minimal recognition of that. Especially in the present days in which infrastructure is such an important word.


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## flitcraft (Jul 5, 2021)

I'm sort of surprised that bus service isn't more prized by the urban carless young folks who Uber their way rather than own cars. Owning a car has always been awkward if not totally impractical in cities--if you don't have off street parking you have to deal with parking space roulette, auto insurance is high in cities, upkeep on a car isn't negligible, public transit, taxis, and ride services are ubiquitous, etc. I almost always see a couple of ubers or lyft vehicles outside the grocery store I frequent, so even those kinds of errands don't require cars. I suppose they fly or rent cars when they want to go out of town. But I remember riding the Dog as a grad student and when I got my first job. Long time ago, and the service has degraded a lot since then, I suppose. My last Greyhound adventure was taking the 99 dollar Ameripass all over the States on my way to relocate from Boston to Seattle, with stops in Jacksonville Florida, New Orleans, Amarillo Texas, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco along the way. 4000 miles of Greyhound fun!


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## jis (Jul 5, 2021)

cirdan said:


> I'm afraid you're probably right.
> 
> Though I would like to think there must be innumerable communities whose Greyhound service, however unglamorous, is their only connection to the outside world for those who don't drive. I would hope that politically there must be at least some minimal recognition of that. Especially in the present days in which infrastructure is such an important word.


In general something like RPA would not exist if there were not plenty of rich railfans and PV owners who are willing to fund such a thing with contributions and endowments, because they see significant personal gains, or at least satisfaction of urges. Among Bus riders I am sure that such is not the case since one does not depend on an equivalent of Amtrak running to tow ones favorite PV around the country or ride in comfort costing thousands of dollars. You just hop in your car or hire a limo and hit the road. Doesn't matter whether Greyhound or any other bus line exists or not.

It is not like the proverbial urban car-less young folks adequately fund RPA either, so why would they do so for buses?


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## SanDiegan (Jul 5, 2021)

TheVig said:


> I haven't been on a long haul Greyhound in many years. I've been on a few short runs between Philly and NYC, but those are mostly commuter type runs IME.
> 
> Unlike the RPA for Amtrak, I don't think there is any meaningful passenger lobbying arm for the bus industry. Not sure the average Greyhound rider, could afford reasonable yearly dues anyways. LOL. At this point, I'm not sure it's possible for Greyhound to shake off all the negative stereotypes. Too many years of being a mode of transportation, for the lowest common denominators amongst us have taken it's toll on the business and brand as a whole.



Now Amtrak is assuming the LCD role with their extremely low coach fares.


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## SanDiegan (Jul 5, 2021)

cirdan said:


> I'm afraid you're probably right.
> 
> Though I would like to think there must be innumerable communities whose Greyhound service, however unglamorous, is their only connection to the outside world for those who don't drive. I would hope that politically there must be at least some minimal recognition of that. Especially in the present days in which infrastructure is such an important word.



Infrastructure is airports and trains, daycare and social programs. Not trains LOL


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## SanDiegan (Jul 5, 2021)

flitcraft said:


> I'm sort of surprised that bus service isn't more prized by the urban carless young folks who Uber their way rather than own cars. Owning a car has always been awkward if not totally impractical in cities--if you don't have off street parking you have to deal with parking space roulette, auto insurance is high in cities, upkeep on a car isn't negligible, public transit, taxis, and ride services are ubiquitous, etc. I almost always see a couple of ubers or lyft vehicles outside the grocery store I frequent, so even those kinds of errands don't require cars. I suppose they fly or rent cars when they want to go out of town. But I remember riding the Dog as a grad student and when I got my first job. Long time ago, and the service has degraded a lot since then, I suppose. My last Greyhound adventure was taking the 99 dollar Ameripass all over the States on my way to relocate from Boston to Seattle, with stops in Jacksonville Florida, New Orleans, Amarillo Texas, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco along the way. 4000 miles of Greyhound fun!



Thy did use Bolt and Megbus until the Greyhound crowd drove them away. They would never admit it though.


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## TheVig (Jul 5, 2021)

SanDiegan said:


> Thy did use Bolt and Megbus until the Greyhound crowd drove them away. They would never admit it though.



I've seen Megabus picking up and dropping off passengers before the pandemic here in Charlotte. The quality of passenger has gone from young to to sketchy. Other cities, I've seen better results.


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## Willbridge (Jul 5, 2021)

railiner said:


> Say what you will, but I think the decline was mainly due to deregulation, where franchises guaranteed protection from cut-throat competition, still provided reasonable fares based on mileage, not market, and "cross-subsidized" weaker branch line routes. Oh, and provided a decent wage and pension for employees.


Deregulation sped up what was already happening way back when we did the 1975 Oregon Intercity Bus study. (Oregon was ahead of many other states in finishing its share of 92% federally-funded Interstates, so in hindsight a lot of the bad effects happened sooner than elsewhere.)

Interstates made city to city passengers demand express service, dividing up traffic in corridors that were not heavy enough to support locals, limiteds, expresses, etc. And they made it easier to drive one's own car or for a friend or family member to drive, even if they had to deadhead to do it. When I set out for college in 1964 most kids from out of town were arriving on their own on public transport. Now, at the same school it's "traditional" that parents drive their students to the campus.

There's an added feature of shareholder interest. You can make more money -- for a while -- by cutting service ahead of the demand instead of waiting for smaller and smaller profits. A colleague at ODOT was threatened by a vice-president of Pacific Trailways for raising that issue. I had already left for Canada by then so missed that.


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## railiner (Jul 5, 2021)

Willbridge said:


> When I set out for college in 1964 most kids from out of town were arriving on their own on public transport. Now, at the same school it's "traditional" that parents drive their students to the campus.


Seems the culture of then and now has changed into so-called "helicopter parent's", that 'hover' over all aspects of their children's lives until they start their own families...


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## railiner (Jul 5, 2021)

While the use of long-haul buses declined somewhat from their peak during WWII, it was a combination of the easy to drive interstate highways, and of course the introduction of low cost air carrier's that accelerated it. But deregulation really changed the industry. Had it not been for that, they might be in much better shape today...


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## cirdan (Jul 6, 2021)

railiner said:


> While the use of long-haul buses declined somewhat from their peak during WWII, it was a combination of the easy to drive interstate highways, and of course the introduction of low cost air carrier's that accelerated it. But deregulation really changed the industry. Had it not been for that, they might be in much better shape today...



It is logical that the massive growth of car ownership and driving of the 1950s to the 1970s hurt trains and buses and led to a massive retrenchment of services.

But that growth has reached its limits a long time ago, simply because everybody who could afford a car already had one and a lot of people began to realize driving wasn't as fun as they had made it out to be, especially in cities. The catastrophic decline of train ridership came to a halt some time ago with everything pointing to a recovery in places, or at least a healthy stabilization in the places where there isn't a recovery. I haven't been following buses because they are not my prime interest, although I do ride on them here and there and thus value them, but I would expect that something similar has happened there for the same reasons.

A massive disinvestment happening today to services that managed to survive all the difficult and lean years thus seems somewhat counterintuitive to me.

In my view the new threat is to some degree from services like Uber which threaten to gnaw at the edges of public transit and abstract ridership from services that are already borderline justifiable. Right now the fact that Uber needs a driver and that driver needs to be making enough money to make the effort worthwhile limits the overall damage the service can cause. But i sometimes wonder what the next step will be when Uber sends fleets of self-driving cars onto the roads. Maybe not in congested inner cities where transit has a clear natural advantage, but more in belt areas and maybe even for intercity travel. Many business people for example value trains because they can work at their computer. If a self driving uber offers that too, and furthermore takes you from door to door, probably for less than the price of a business class train ticket plus transfers at both ends, what does that mean for trains?


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## railiner (Jul 6, 2021)

cirdan said:


> It is logical that the massive growth of car ownership and driving of the 1950s to the 1970s hurt trains and buses and led to a massive retrenchment of services.
> 
> But that growth has reached its limits a long time ago, simply because everybody who could afford a car already had one and a lot of people began to realize driving wasn't as fun as they had made it out to be, especially in cities. The catastrophic decline of train ridership came to a halt some time ago with everything pointing to a recovery in places, or at least a healthy stabilization in the places where there isn't a recovery. I haven't been following buses because they are not my prime interest, although I do ride on them here and there and thus value them, but I would expect that something similar has happened there for the same reasons.
> 
> ...


As I predicted in another thread, that is the not so distant future. Eventually personal cars except in rural areas will be replaced by membership of various autonomous vehicle co-ops, with different size vehicles for different purposes.


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## PVD (Jul 6, 2021)

Areas like much of nYC where parking is both difficult and expensive make car ownership a challenge....Lots of weekend car rentals and companies like "Zip Car" thriving...Of course homes with parking, or developments or buildings with free or readily available parking also exist. My garage (same coop where Railiner lived) is $46, considering the extra storage space I get with it, totally worth it...


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## jis (Jul 6, 2021)

PVD said:


> Of course homes with parking, or developments or buildings with free or readily available parking also exist. My garage (same coop where Railiner lived) is $46, considering the extra storage space I get with it, totally worth it...


That is exactly the reason I rented a garage at the apartment complex that I lived in in Short Hills NJ. In addition it removed the need for digging my car out after a snow storm too.

Here in Florida where I live in a single family home in the suburbs of Melbourne and exurbs of Orlando, I have a two car garage which I use marginally for storage and the usual HVAC and Water Heater, and mostly for the car, unlike many here who seem to use theirs mostly for storage and park their car in the their driveway. The HOA does not allow overnight parking on the streets as it is viewed as an emergency vehicle access related fire code violation.


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## MARC Rider (Jul 6, 2021)

Willbridge said:


> When I set out for college in 1964 most kids from out of town were arriving on their own on public transport. Now, at the same school it's "traditional" that parents drive their students to the campus.


At my daughter's college, the only public transportation was (is) the once-a-day _Pennsylvanian_. No buses, not even taxi service in town. She took the train from Baltimore a couple of times, but it's a 6-7 hour trip with a connection in Philadelphia vs. a 3 hour drive. Sometimes, she'd take the _Pennsylvanian_ to Harrisburg where we picked her up. At least it was a 1.5 hour drive for us instead of a 3 hour drive. But a lot of times we'd drive her. But she was definitely not interested in getting a car and driving herself. I was completely different, as I had to not only fly and change to the Dog for a 2 hour ride to school, but I had to mess around with the CTA to get from O'Hare to the Greyhound station. At least now, she drives herself to work. Unfortunately, they don't pay her enough for her to afford to buy her own car, so I have to keep an old beater I'd like to get rid of for her to drive.


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## MARC Rider (Jul 6, 2021)

cirdan said:


> It is logical that the massive growth of car ownership and driving of the 1950s to the 1970s hurt trains and buses and led to a massive retrenchment of services.
> 
> But that growth has reached its limits a long time ago, simply because everybody who could afford a car already had one and a lot of people began to realize driving wasn't as fun as they had made it out to be, especially in cities. The catastrophic decline of train ridership came to a halt some time ago with everything pointing to a recovery in places, or at least a healthy stabilization in the places where there isn't a recovery. I haven't been following buses because they are not my prime interest, although I do ride on them here and there and thus value them, but I would expect that something similar has happened there for the same reasons.
> 
> ...


First, I think that true self-driving cars in mixed traffic is a pipe dream. I don't care what the tech professionals say. I use their other products, and I know they're not reliable. (I'll refrain from telling you about the "smart"phone alarm that never seems to go off when you want it to, and does go off when you didn't program it to do so.  Almost missed some appointments and Amtrak trains because of that.)

Another issue with autonomous vehicles is that to even have a ghost of a chance to operate safely, they'll have to drive "gently," like Grandpa driving to church on Sunday. They'll also be programmed to observe traffic laws, such as red lights, stop signs, and speed limits, and also be programmed to yield the right of way of there's any ambiguity. Given my decades long observation of behavior on the roads of this great land, the American driver isn't going to stand for such behavior, and thus, will either avoid using self-driving cars or will try to do unauthorized reprogramming to make the self-driving cars drive they way they do, thus negating any possible safety advantage of self-driving cars.

Another thing to consider is that riding in a car is actually sort of uncomfortable, compared to a bus or train. You have to contort yourself to get into your seat, and once you're buckled in, you really can't move around without stopping the car and getting out. A lot of back seats don't have very much legroom, either.

In fact, I think the only real practical advantage of traveling by car is that you can make your own schedule. Oh, yes, and you don't have to share your space with a stranger.

For these reasons, I think that autonomous vehicles will probably be mostly deployed for fixed route exclusive traffic stuff like airport shuttles as a sort of cheap-ass people mover. I don't really think the mass public is going to go for them, at least not for a long, long, while.


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## Exvalley (Jul 6, 2021)

Sitting next to a stranger can be pretty miserable on a bus. It would be nice to see some more 1-2 seating. But then again, the experiment of a limo-bus between Boston and New York did not work out.


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## MARC Rider (Jul 6, 2021)

Exvalley said:


> Sitting next to a stranger can be pretty miserable on a bus.  It would be nice to see some more 1-2 seating. But then again, the experiment of a limo-bus between Boston and New York did not work out.


Oh, yes, that's the other advantage of a car. You don't have to share space with a stranger.


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## Deni (Jul 6, 2021)

railiner said:


> Seems the culture of then and now has changed into so-called "helicopter parent's", that 'hover' over all aspects of their children's lives until they start their own families...


Boy that is true. I have a 12-year-old and she is the ptretty rare kid at her school that takes the L or bikes to school (depends on her mood or the weather). I know parents that live half as far as we do from the school and drive their kids. She got in to a test-in public school for 7th grade next year and will now go farther to school on the south side (cue scary music) and the upper-middle class white parents at her current school all kept asking me how she was going to get there (or asked how long the drive is) and when I told many of them she would still take transit the look on their face was like I said she got a job in an asbestos factory. I got the same look from so many of them when she started riding the L to/from school on her own when she was around 9 or 10. Two stops on the Red Line in the safest area of Chicago and I swear there are parents who think I am guilty of child endangerment.


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## jis (Jul 6, 2021)

MARC Rider said:


> First, I think that true self-driving cars in mixed traffic is a pipe dream. I don't care what the tech professionals say. I use their other products, and I know they're not reliable. (I'll refrain from telling you about the "smart"phone alarm that never seems to go off when you want it to, and does go off when you didn't program it to do so.  Almost missed some appointments and Amtrak trains because of that.)


I would tend to agree with you, specially given the crisis of software quality (or lack thereof) coupled with the other discussion about crisis in management that we had elsewhere. At present the method of fixing such problems seems to be the Onion approach. Add another layer fixing a few glaring problems and add an additional pile of its own, and go onto the next layer. It is well attuned to the capitalist paradigm of digging ditches and filling them as you go along. As for which of the collective bugs poke their heads out at the end, well that is an ongoing experiment in life. 

But then again that is how life works too, so it is possible that we will just have the self driving cars become full blown participants in the existing demolition derby on the roads, and there will be quite a bit of fun figuring out who to ascribe blame to for accidents caused by design and programming errors.


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## Brian Battuello (Jul 6, 2021)




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## cirdan (Jul 6, 2021)

jis said:


> I would tend to agree with you, specially given the crisis of software quality (or lack thereof) coupled with the other discussion about crisis in management that we had elsewhere. At present the method of fixing such problems seems to be the Onion approach. Add another layer fixing a few glaring problems and add an additional pile of its own, and go onto the next layer. It is well attuned to the capitalist paradigm of digging ditches and filling them as you go along. As for which of the collective bugs poke their heads out at the end, well that is an ongoing experiment in life.



I disagree. The rate at which software and computing power develop is stunning.

In the 1980s most computers were still clunky machines where you had to type something at the prompt line and if you got just one character wrong the computer couldn't work out what you meant and you could type it all again.

Today we have things like facial recognition software and even simple cheap devices like your smartphone can work out who is in the photograph. It's a different world and if we could teleport somebody from then to today's world they would think we had invented magic.

Give it another 20 years and I don't see why all the bugs of autonomous cars shouldn't be ironed out.

Autonomous cars don't need to be 100% safe to be accepted (an impossibly high target). They just have to be safer than human drivers.


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## jis (Jul 6, 2021)

cirdan said:


> I disagree. The rate at which software and computing power develop is stunning.
> 
> In the 1980s most computers were still clunky machines where you had to type something at the prompt line and if you got just one character wrong the computer couldn't work out what you meant and you could type it all again.
> 
> ...


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## Brian Battuello (Jul 6, 2021)

As an interested bystander, I've read quite a few articles and books about autonomous cars. I fully agree that the mix of self driving and standard driving will be really, uh, interesting.

One of the biggest problems is liability and the current insurance/legal system. You aren't going to be able to buy an insurance policy that just covers drivers, as today. The insurance will have to be baked into the price of the car or perhaps the registration. It would help if more states were already no fault, but the ambulance chasers won't allow it. 

Rather than Tesla style fancy lane holders which work until they can't see the lanes, I think the real progress will be in local pizza delivery and in large office complex mini-shuttles. I'd be happy to jump into a self driving shuttle to the cafeteria building. It could easily coexist with people looking for parking places. 

I-95 on a Friday night with Beemer speed demons, not so much.


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## Brian Battuello (Jul 6, 2021)

cirdan said:


> they would think we had invented magic


 
"*Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic* " - Arthur C. Clarke 1973


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## jiml (Jul 6, 2021)

The weak link in autonomous vehicles - even when "perfected" - is inconsistencies in the road markings and signs needed to support them from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Until those are standardized on a nationwide (or North America wide) basis self-driving vehicles can never be truly autonomous no matter how smart they are. The cost and scale of achieving this support structure will dwarf the development of the vehicles themselves..


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## Brian Battuello (Jul 6, 2021)

Amen. First of all, there are a zillion places where the line markings are either nonexistent or conflicting. My local freeway is being repaired and has two almost identical sets of line markings about 18" apart. 
You really have to think to determine which are correct. And then there is weather. I can recall many rain storms where I just couldn't see the road any more and pulled under a bridge to chill until it got better.


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## Exvalley (Jul 6, 2021)

jiml said:


> The weak link in autonomous vehicles - even when "perfected" - is inconsistencies in the road markings and signs needed to support them from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.


Those of us who live in very snowy areas know that by spring the lines are barely noticeable on many of our roads. The plows do a number on them.


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## Bob Dylan (Jul 6, 2021)

Exvalley said:


> Those of us who live in very snowy areas know that by spring the lines are barely noticeable on many of our roads. The plows do a number on them.


Same thing down here where the constant traffic and weather do the same thing!


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## jpakala (Jul 6, 2021)

From my reprint of a 1928 or '29 RR Official Guide I'm amazed at the ubiquitous passenger service. Many of the towns no longer show up even on robust road maps that States issue (some of which still include all rail lines). The towns which still do are often very small in population. Even larger towns lack public transportation at least when the bus disappears. Most poverty is in rural areas, so long-distance roadworthy cars are few. And many, such as the young or elderly do not have a car anyway and couldn't drive it a long way if they did.


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## neroden (Jul 6, 2021)

cirdan said:


> Autonomous cars don't need to be 100% safe to be accepted (an impossibly high target). They just have to be safer than human drivers.



Psych studies show that in order to be accepted they need to be *100 times safer* than human drivers. Yep. Not kidding. People vastly prefer being killed by a human than killed by a robot. It's going to take a long time to get there.

Of course, autonomous trains are already there. Turns out being on rails makes the problem a lot easier.


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## neroden (Jul 6, 2021)

cirdan said:


> I'm afraid you're probably right.
> 
> Though I would like to think there must be innumerable communities whose Greyhound service, however unglamorous, is their only connection to the outside world for those who don't drive. I would hope that politically there must be at least some minimal recognition of that. Especially in the present days in which infrastructure is such an important word.


The Greyhound map is well-hidden by Greyhound, because it's a mismanaged company going bankrupt, but here's a 2019 version:



https://www.greyhound.com/-/media/greyhound/images/discover/2019-greyhound-network-map.pdf



Leave out "partner carriers" (the green lines). The orange lines ("Greyhound Express") only serve the largest cities. If you only look at the blue lines, the first thing you'll notice is that most of Greyhound's lines are parallelling Amtrak rather than going in different directions. So there aren't as many of those "Greyhound-only" communities as you'd think. :-( Most of the remainder are actually following railroad routes too...


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## railiner (Jul 6, 2021)

PVD said:


> Areas like much of nYC where parking is both difficult and expensive make car ownership a challenge....Lots of weekend car rentals and companies like "Zip Car" thriving...Of course homes with parking, or developments or buildings with free or readily available parking also exist. My garage (same coop where Railiner lived) is $46, considering the extra storage space I get with it, totally worth it...


And just like the monthly carrying charge for the apartment, way, way, below what the market rate would be for the garage. You have to be on a a very long waiting list to get one. Or even an assigned outdoor spot. As original's in that co-op (Feb, 1954) my family fortunately had one...


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## flitcraft (Jul 7, 2021)

neroden said:


> Psych studies show that in order to be accepted they need to be *100 times safer* than human drivers. Yep. Not kidding. People vastly prefer being killed by a human than killed by a robot. It's going to take a long time to get there.


Actually, human preferences are even worse than that, assuming that the psych studies are correct. It appears that people prefer having 100 people killed by humans rather than a single person killed by a robot. But this turns out to be consistent with other risk assessments that people tend to make irrationally, too.


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## toddinde (Jul 7, 2021)

Transportation is in a very sad state in this country. Amtrak is a bright spot even with its huge problems. Air travel is truly bad, and then it gets worse. Greyhound is really unreliable, and the clientele can be very unusual. I tried Megabus a few times. Unreliable as well, and standing on a corner in sleet isn’t reasonable. My proposal would be to do what they do in Europe. The busses are collocated with the train station and connections are easy. Basically, Amtrak thruway on a massive scale. Build a true, national ground transportation system. I’ve ridden the intercity busses in Mexico, and they’re amazing. Clean, comfortable, reliable. Everything Greyhound isn’t. I truly want Greyhound to thrive because Amtrak can only really prosper with an interconnection to a vibrant, connecting bus system.


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## Willbridge (Jul 7, 2021)

toddinde said:


> Transportation is in a very sad state in this country. Amtrak is a bright spot even with its huge problems. Air travel is truly bad, and then it gets worse. Greyhound is really unreliable, and the clientele can be very unusual. I tried Megabus a few times. Unreliable as well, and standing on a corner in sleet isn’t reasonable. My proposal would be to do what they do in Europe. The busses are collocated with the train station and connections are easy. Basically, Amtrak thruway on a massive scale. Build a true, national ground transportation system. I’ve ridden the intercity busses in Mexico, and they’re amazing. Clean, comfortable, reliable. Everything Greyhound isn’t. I truly want Greyhound to thrive because Amtrak can only really prosper with an interconnection to a vibrant, connecting bus system.


There is an increasing number of stations that include Greyhound and Amtrak Thruway or other bus services. However, that has mainly been state initiative and them taking advantage of local opportunities. And sometimes things go backwards. The first state-sponsored intermodal station in Oregon was The Dalles, served by Amtrak's _Pioneer_ and by Pacific Trailways, both gone now. Greyhound still serves The Dalles once a day in each direction.


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## railiner (Jul 7, 2021)

Exvalley said:


> Sitting next to a stranger can be pretty miserable on a bus. It would be nice to see some more 1-2 seating. But then again, the experiment of a limo-bus between Boston and New York did not work out.


While LimoLiner failed, others have succeeded. Examples include C&J between NH and NY, Red Coach in FL, and Vonlane in TX and OK…


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## Brian Battuello (Jul 7, 2021)

Not trying LimoLiner is one of my few travel regrets.


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## Exvalley (Jul 7, 2021)

Can someone explain to me why C&J goes from New York City to Tewksbury, MA?


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## Eric S (Jul 7, 2021)

Exvalley said:


> Can someone explain to me why C&J goes from New York City to Tewksbury, MA?


Isn't it a New York - Portsmouth, NH route that stops at Tewksbury (and Seabrook, NH) along the way?


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## railiner (Jul 7, 2021)

Eric S said:


> Isn't it a New York - Portsmouth, NH route that stops at Tewksbury (and Seabrook, NH) along the way?


It is...



https://www.ridecj.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/cj-schedules-NYC-062521.pdf



Due to Hours of Service limitations for drivers doing round trips, they sometimes change drivers at Tewksbury...


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## Exvalley (Jul 7, 2021)

Okay… why Portsmouth rather than Boston?


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## cirdan (Jul 8, 2021)

Brian Battuello said:


> Amen. First of all, there are a zillion places where the line markings are either nonexistent or conflicting. My local freeway is being repaired and has two almost identical sets of line markings about 18" apart.
> You really have to think to determine which are correct. And then there is weather. I can recall many rain storms where I just couldn't see the road any more and pulled under a bridge to chill until it got better.



At work we have a yearly event where all the senior engineering staff get together in an informal environment and during the day we have workshops and discuss serious stuff and in the evenings we do more light-hearted stuff. Typically for the opening session we have an external speaker who is typically somebody slightly unusual. Often we have crazy inventors or entrepreneurs or people who invented computer games, stuff like that.

About three years ago we had somebody a bit different. He was a senior developer from the research lab of a major European car manufacturer and he was talking about autonomous vehicles. In his presentation, we walked through real-life situations, sometimes frame by frame, to see how it worked. The software took the picture apart and identified all objects it could and labelled them. For example with 99.5% probability this is a tree. With 68% probability this is a dog, with 83% probability this is a discarded candy wrapper. With 97% probability this is a pedestrian. It was really amazing to see how the picture was analyzed and got most of it right. Sometimes it made hilarious mistakes of course. But it was only a prototype.

And after that there was a continuity and credibility filter. So if the previous stage had said, with 45% probability this is a dolphin, that would get overruled. Then there was also a category for stuff that couldn't be identified.

As a next step all these objects were graded by relevance concerning any risk they posed, any unexpected actions they might take, and any relevance they had on the next decision of the autonomous pilot.

For example if there is a road sign with writing on it, the software had to make a call whether the text should be analyzed and acted upon, for example, reduce speed. Or is it an advertising bill board that can safely be ignored. The location of the sign was also a factor here, but there were quite a few borderline cases. As such it doesn't really matter if one county or state uses a slightly different typeface or color because that's not the sole criterion.

The same with road markings. Lots of stuff was being picked up. Is this thing here a shadow or a crack in the road surface, or is it a marking? Or is it a stain? Lots of context is analyzed here and actions of other vehicles are observed too. For example there was one scene where a truck had stopped on the roadway to unload some stuff and the only way past it was to ignore road markings and cross over onto the other lane which was used by opposing traffic. The car thus had to decide to ignore the road marking and observe oncoming vehicles to identify an opportunity to pull out and pass the truck. Observing the actions of the cars in front also helped here. But it might be that the situation occurs without there being cars to copy so its all amazingly complex yet fascinating. In another scene there had been an accident and cops were directing traffic and the car had to do a left turn despite there being a no-left-turns sign. 

All this was a prototype of course and is still under development. But I don't think any problems of this type will remain unresolvable.


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## railiner (Jul 8, 2021)

Exvalley said:


> Okay… why Portsmouth rather than Boston?


Because they are filling a "niche" market, that is underserved by other direct forms of transportation, rather than get into the fiercely competitive Boston/New York market...


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## Exvalley (Jul 8, 2021)

railiner said:


> Because they are filling a "niche" market


Understood, but that seems like a niche within a niche.


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## Willbridge (Jul 8, 2021)

Exvalley said:


> Understood, but that seems like a niche within a niche.


Sometimes there are very specific details that have tipped the balance toward a non-central terminal. In the Denver area one of the independent lines served the Denver Bus Center downtown but terminated in Commerce City. Their garage was there and it is an area with potential package express business. I'm sure it looked odd to readers of the Bus Guide.


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## Eric S (Jul 8, 2021)

Exvalley said:


> Understood, but that seems like a niche within a niche.


Seems like C&J's niche is linking Portsmouth with Boston and New York. It operates both a Boston - Portsmouth route and the New York - Portsmouth route in question. I haven't looked at all the options serving the Boston - Portland corridor but perhaps Portsmouth is underserved by those services.


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## railiner (Jul 8, 2021)

Willbridge said:


> Sometimes there are very specific details that have tipped the balance toward a non-central terminal. In the Denver area one of the independent lines served the Denver Bus Center downtown but terminated in Commerce City. Their garage was there and it is an area with potential package express business. I'm sure it looked odd to readers of the Bus Guide.


There was so much bus package express business at Commerce City, that during the years I worked for Continental Trailways in Denver (1974 to 1979), every afternoon at 5:30 we sent an empty "combo" coach there to load the bottom bays, the rear combo section, and sometimes even the forward seating area with packages. It then made the short trip to the downtown bus terminal, and the packages were unloaded, to be distributed to evening departures for all points. Besides that run, the combo buses were used on one of the two daily long thin routes from Denver to Billings, MT...


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