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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Ep. 34: The History of Regional Buses In The US
What if a simple bus ride could reveal the fascinating history of American transportation? Join us on Transit Tangents as we uncover the incredible story of intercity bus travel in the United States, starting with Carl Eric Wickman's entrepreneurial journey in 1914. From the humble beginnings of motorized stagecoaches to the revolutionary coast-to-coast routes established by the Yelloway Pioneer system in 1928, this episode promises to transport you back in time and shed light on how Greyhound became an iconic symbol of cross-country travel.
Louis recreated the Yelloway Pioneer Map from 1928 that you can see on Google Maps here for those who are interested: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=15C9-rcuMo-txoKzIfq71Ke68mGuy9j0&usp=sharing
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How are Greyhound bus lines, vienna, sausages, dial, soap and Mickey Mouse related?
Speaker 2:We're gonna find out on today's episode of Transit Tangents. My name's Lewis and I'm Chris, and yeah, we're going to see how all of those things are related Before we get into the Vienna sausages and dial soap and Mickey Mouse. I actually don't even know all the details of this. Chris has done a lot more of the research on this one, so I'm excited to find out with you. But we're going to start off by kind of discussing the inception of intercity buses in the us. The real topic of the episode is intercity buses. For sure, this is the bonus.
Speaker 3:You get the bonus fun fact uh mixed in as well, and though this episode is going to come out, I think, at a later date, it is worthy of noting that we are filming this on the 4th of July, and what is more iconic American lore than taking a bus across the country?
Speaker 2:yeah, no, I mean, it's a. It's a fun thing to think about. I've driven across the country more than once at this day. I think I've done it four times now. It's a journey in a car, but man doing it, doing it in a bus is, uh, that's. I've not done that. That's rowdy, but people used to do it all the time and Miles in Transit still does it today. There's an amazing video.
Speaker 1:We arrived in Pittsburgh 25 minutes late. There's a bit of a stir right now because no one's issued reboarding tickets, which is just a classic like Greyhound thing I feel like should not get them. As it turns out out, we didn't get reboarding tickets because the bus from pittsburgh to columbus had been unceremoniously canceled. Pittsburgh to columbus, which we were doing anyway 40, 40 to st louis st louis st louis to la. Oh, great, wait, we're going to la.
Speaker 3:Yeah, apparently so inner city bus travel in the us really goes back to about 1914. Prior to that there was definitely bus services within cities and a lot of times I mean, if you think back, these were like omnibuses that were pulled by stagecoaches. Then eventually, something that was a little more motorized you know motorized stagecoaches, that kind of stuff. But we really started to see this concept of going city to city by bus in 1914.
Speaker 3:And that started with Carl Eric Wickman, who was a Swedish immigrant to the US and was a Hupsmobile salesman, and if you don't know what a Hupsmobile is, think of like a very old timey car, that's pretty much it. We'll throw up some photos of it for people to see. But he was a Hupmobile salesman, but not a very good one, and so he had seven cars that he was supposed to sell and he couldn't sell them. So instead he'd drive the cars back and forth between Hibbing Minnesota to the local mines, taking miners back and forth and charging them about 15 cents per ride, realized he can make some money on it and then started expanding his business into more regional travel Gotcha.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean up until this point, like rails were the main source of getting between cities, buses, obviously, like the car, had kind of just been invented not long before this, so the idea of buses getting there. There was no interstate highway system at this point, so city to city travel was definitely done by rail at this point. This is long before the system of passenger rail in the United States was basically gutted because of the interstate highway system and everyone getting around in cars. So in 1928, the Yellow Way Pioneer system was the first actual way to get from one side of the country to the other. They established the first route that would get folks from Los Angeles all the way to Philadelphia, and it was in a different way than Greyhound does their kind of cross-country buses today.
Speaker 2:You actually transferred multiple times between city to city, to city to city to city. Basically it was a collection of all of these intercity bus routes that would go from, you know, la to Las Vegas, and then there might be one from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City and then one from Salt Lake City to Denver and then you know, and maybe smaller cases and whatnot throughout, but it was the first way to go all the way across the country the first kind of use of transfers with buses, and it covered a total of 3,400 highway miles and it would take five days and 14 hours to complete that journey. I don't know exactly how many transfers, but definitely a journey.
Speaker 3:But that is okay. So that's wild, because on one of our episodes, way back, we talked about how cool is it to say way back.
Speaker 1:Way back. I know we have so many episodes we go way back.
Speaker 3:But on one of our episodes way back, we talked about the 1919 uh transcontinental motor convoy, and this is the famous convoy that president eisen well, not president then, but, um, a young eisenhower uh was a part of, and they were testing to see how far or how long it would take the military to go from one side of the country to the other. This is in 1919, so nine years before this uh inner city bus route. It took them 62 days.
Speaker 2:Wow. So in nine years the infrastructure improved enough to get the time from 62 days to five and a half days. Basically, that is pretty impressive yeah.
Speaker 3:Yellow Way Pioneer. They had come up with this system and then our good friend Carl Wickman decided that was such a good idea that he wanted to purchase that company. So his company had expanded into the American Motor Transportation Company, and then they purchased Yellow Way Pioneer. A few years later they adopted the name Greyhound and put the running dogs on all of their buses, and inner city travel from one side of the country to the other was born and you know, even today we still see that logo on buses, although, you know, maybe not as many as we used to, but but they're still around.
Speaker 3:Maybe not, but we see those more than any other bus. That's fair yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So moving on in time a little bit the 1920s, 30s and 40s we started to see a lot more standardization of the system, especially within Greyhound. The buses all started to look the same. They'd be ordering them all to be the same format, the same look inside, outside, and you also had the creation of the American Bus Association which kind of helped along with that. Beyond that, this is when we started to see the development of the US highway system. So this is not the interstate system yet, but it was the most connected series of well-maintained roads to get you between city to city which really helped make it so that the buses could run on a much more reliable schedule. The roads were going to be much smoother paved, all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 3:And this is what we talked about in one of the previous episodes, about tolling where in the 1920s, the federal government really went on this huge highway expansion.
Speaker 2:Right, and all of this stuff really made it so that buses were now becoming competitive with rail and, in some cases, small towns that were not connected to rail were now actually able to connect into the greater system of now intercity buses as well as into the rail system, whereas before, you know, expanding a railroad into their town might have been really difficult to do, but to establish a bus route that goes there was a much lower barrier to entry for those communities to kind of get connected to the rest of the country communities to kind of get connected to the rest of the country.
Speaker 3:Because of that flexibility and lower cost of barrier for bus lines, by 1934, greyhound was the largest bus carrier in the country. They were carrying approximately 400 million passengers per year and that was just about as many passengers as the class one railroads. So the railroads that were taking you across the country. Greyhound was basically just as large as the railroad companies and that is absolutely crazy that they grew that fast.
Speaker 2:Right, and that's a major shift. And I mean you have to imagine that the convenience of being able to get closer to your final destination probably helped in the sense of, like, a lot of towns not necessarily being connected. Yeah, that's a huge shift.
Speaker 3:And then it's actually interesting because, uh, about 1934 is when greyhound really surged in population and the greyhound company will attribute that to a movie that came out in 1934 called it happened one night. Uh, it was about an heiress who traveled, uh by greyhound, uh with a reporter who was played play, who was played by clark gable uh, and it was such an immensely popular film that people saw bus travel as this sort of romantic way to get from city to city and it it absolutely took off that's hilarious now because, uh, I mean, we just took a bus.
Speaker 2:We'll talk about this a little later on. We took a bus from san antonio to austin the other day and, uh, romantic is not the word that I would use to describe it. It was fine, that's fair. It was fine, not romantic. No, uh, moving forward though, uh, the 1940s to the 1960s, I mean things, things really really took off for Greyhound in a major way. In 1941, greyhound actually purchased Greyhound Canada, and go ahead.
Speaker 3:Oh, there's a funny story about that Greyhound Canada was not part of Greyhound. Greyhound Canada was a collection of other bus companies that had really started in like the northwestern part of Canada and they just they saw the success of greyhound in the us and they said, well, that's a good name, we'll just take the name right. Yeah, greyhound. Like sued them multiple times and like you can't do this and finally they were just like we'll buy them. Screw it, we'll buy you.
Speaker 2:yes, yeah, um, but I mean that that is a major uh benefit as well. I mean, now you have connection into your neighboring country to the north, be able to connect cities, especially like in the northeast. There's a lot of close proximity between cities like Toronto and Buffalo and Montreal to Burlington, vermont and down to New York City and Boston, and I'm sure that at the time that was a major benefit of those routes. We're going to jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video, go ahead and do so. Also, leave a comment. We love reading all of them and respond to as many as we can, and be sure that you are subscribed so that you catch every episode as they come out.
Speaker 3:Please share this with your friends and if you don't have time to watch YouTube videos in the future, you can catch us on any of the podcast platforms that are out there. Just be sure to leave us a rating and give us a comment. Moving into World War II, bus travel again had this major upswing in passengers, and that was largely because gasoline was being rationed, so you needed to fit way more people into one vehicle. You need more efficient ways to get people across the country, so buses were the solution of the time. So during this World War II era, huge boost to Greyhound and other companies like Trailways, which we'll kind of talk about in a minute the two big competing bus lines at the time.
Speaker 3:Once you get into the post-war, all of America was really booming. We had this massive industrial complex. You had all of the GIs coming back and buying homes in suburbia and suddenly you had these sort of dense suburban pockets that had previously been serviced by trolley cars, now being serviced by bus lines too, right, and that's like a lot of cities across the country, you know.
Speaker 2:You might notice that there were rail routes in some areas. These like streetcars and whatnot Most of them in a lot of cities were removed. Here in Austin, you know, there was a small streetcar network that was removed and yeah, it was just they were removing them and putting them, putting, you know, city buses in place in a lot of cases. But yeah, I mean interesting to hear about Trailways. So there was a big competitor and Trailways was another kind of network type one it was a bunch of regional providers all working together.
Speaker 3:Over 100 companies. Sorry, sorry.
Speaker 2:You're good, yeah, all working together and it's kind of funny, I feel like I still see the Trailways name used on buses today. So while Greyhound eventually did purchase the largest of the Trailways companies, trailways still exists in some form or another today, I believe.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. I think they're still around. I remember being a kid and I think taking a Trailways bus, but the thing is a lot of the companies that still use the Trailways name.
Speaker 2:they do mostly charter services so I think anytime I took a trailways bus it was, um, like we'd go to the zoo in another city, uh, for school trips and that kind of thing gotcha okay, yep, um, but yeah, I mean, we really did see a lot of consolidation start to happen towards the end of this era though, where, uh, you know, there was a lot of competition and it started to kind of narrow down and narrow down and narrow down.
Speaker 3:And this was really the golden age of bus travel in the US. I mean, think about any type of like movie that was set in this timeframe in the 50s, 60s. They usually involve some type of bus. I think of Forrest Gump sitting at the bus stop, telling his entire life story at the bus stop. This is also when Greyhound had their iconic buses out. They were the scenic liners, I think they were called, where it was very streamlined and they were all silver and they had the hump in the back, so you would actually go in and have sort of like an Amtrak car today. You'd have a little observation area in the back of the bus. Just really iconic symbols of America during this time, right.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, for Greyhound and regional buses in general, the Golden Age did not last an extremely long time, unfortunately. As we moved into the 70s, 80s, 90s, obviously, the automobile became even more accessible than it already was. Families across the country were sprawling further and further out into different suburbs and it becomes as we've talked about on this channel multiple times, more and more difficult to serve these areas by transit, and that includes some of this inter-regional transit as well, because if you live really far away from the stop in the middle of the town, you're going to have to take a bus to get to the bus. You know, the further away you are from where these pickup services happen, the less likely are going to be to use it. So, um, between the rise of the automobile becoming even more accessible to folks, the interstate system the interstate system made it right. You can now drive everywhere so much faster.
Speaker 2:Um, airlines really were taking off as well. I it was easier and easier to fly across the country to different places. So those longer routes were no longer necessary in a lot of cases, even though some of them still exist today, even though I think that that's insane, as we've talked about in the Amtrak episode as well, but yeah, there was lots of different forms of competition that, frankly, were way more convenient for folks in most cases, I think the interstate and airlines those are the two things that sort of killed the buses at this time, or we're slowly killing them.
Speaker 3:Um, yeah, like you said, interstate system huge, really easy to get from city to city now. Um, but around the 70s is when the airline industry was deregulated and so there's a lot more competition that popped up. Uh, they were able to sort of cut prices and people suddenly saw an affordable way to get from one side of the country to the other that wasn't sitting on a bus for five days, right, yeah, so airlines were a huge, huge part of it. And about this time we had the energy crisis as well in the 70s, so some fuel prices did go up, which, if you're running a big gasoline-heavy industry, that's also going to hurt you a little bit. But with all of this, greyhound saw the writing on the wall of our revenues are going to be declining. People are relying on these other services and so they thought we really need to diversify, and this is where we opened up, where this just went off the rails for me when I was researching this.
Speaker 2:Literally off the rails, because these are on the roads, yeah exactly.
Speaker 3:Well, this went off the road as well. In 1970, greyhound purchased the Armour Company. If you're not familiar with the Armour Company, it was one of the largest meatpacking companies in the country. It's like one of the top five meatpacking companies, not a armor company. It was one of the largest meat packing companies in the country. It's like one of the top five meat packing companies, not a good company. All throughout the 1800s, horrible, horrible labor relations, horrible accident rates which is great for a meat packing company, terrible union busting. But in the Spanish-American War they were responsible for thousands and thousands of soldiers being food poisoned for selling rotten meat to the US. Oh God, like not a great company.
Speaker 2:Right, maybe they got a deal, I don't know.
Speaker 3:They must have gotten a deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Greyhound bought this company. They wanted to diversify. Well, armor also had a breakout uh, pharmaceutical and cosmetic division, okay, and their breakout star product was dial soaps damn, which was like the first mass-produced antibacterial soap in the country, uh-huh. And so they had this huge profit maker of dial soaps and greyhounds like that. I want that. That's what's gonna.
Speaker 2:That's what's gonna help us. What a random pivot to it. Like it's not even really related and I mean I guess kudos to them to like if you're trying to keep your bus network afloat, at least for a period of time, you use these other things to kind of supplement the costs. But like wild, that's like whoever was making those decisions. I mean again, they probably at least prolonged it so that they were able to keep things going longer here and obviously the Greyhound still exists. But yeah, definitely interesting.
Speaker 3:Absolutely wild. So, yeah, you had inner city bus travel, a company that packaged Vienna sausages and dial soap Right All together under one umbrella. Wild, yeah, and eventually what's actually kind of a funny pivot off of that is is dial soaps eventually separated completely from the companies, but they were still under the name Greyhound and it was much later they realized they had to change their name because investors and consumers were really confused and they had a call in line to the dial soaps and people would call in asking why their bus was delayed.
Speaker 2:The soap people are just like I don't know, sir, this is soaps, this is not your bus. And it got even crazier too In 1984, they decided to get into the cruise industry. Yeah, that's interesting. They ended up actually operating the official cruise line of Walt Disney World for a while.
Speaker 3:They bought the premier cruise line and they ran it for multiple years until it went bankrupt.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely an interesting track record of again. I mean, I appreciate the thought process of trying to diversify a little bit to keep your. You know, maybe they're using that money to keep their core business going, knowing that intercity buses are going to need to stay around and they need to subsidize them somehow. Interesting that they were just doing it on their own with soap, sausage and cruises Soap sausage and cruises.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, it was a wild time.
Speaker 3:It was a wild time for the companies, and again we were talking about Greyhound, and this is supposed to be about inner city bus travel as a whole, but Greyhound is the dominant force in inner city bus travel up to this point and we'll talk about the modern era in just a moment but up to this point, greyhound dominated the space, and so if even they were like we have to diversify into all these other options, like you know, this is not a good time for the industry.
Speaker 3:As we moved into the late 80s and the 90s, you've also had a lot of bus driver strikes, which affected the company pretty heavily. You had a major antitrust lawsuit against Greyhound because they were sort of forcing the providers of the stations and cities to only sell their bus tickets, and so you had all of this stuff going on, which really was hurting the company. Until about the late 1990s, they got a new CEO and then they started to look at okay, how can we fix this horrible brand reputation that we have now and really start to turn the company around. This is also after a bankruptcy or two, so a lot of turmoil happening in this industry at the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and kind of moving forward as well. I mean, in the 2000s we saw a couple of new players enter the space Megabus, which I've got some personal experience with on a couple occasions, bolt Bus there's a lot of like regional ones too, I know in the Northeast in particular. I haven't ridden some of these ones but like, like you see, peter pan uh, chinatown express or chinatown bus there was.
Speaker 2:That was a big brand, yeah, and then I mean even I've there's a lot of like, at least in new england, regional ones. You've got like a couple bus lines that operate throughout new hampshire, maine, massachusetts, um, so I there's just ones I haven't experienced with, but a lot of new players kind of entering the space, uh, in in the 2000s at this time.
Speaker 3:This is when Greyhound was also being purchased by other companies. So, like Bolt Bus, for instance, was a European company that also had purchased Greyhound Gotcha. So 1990s bad time. We start moving into the 2000s and bus travel actually starts to come back up, and a lot of that has to do with the way the company's sort of turned around. They got a lot of investment from European companies. Megabus was a European company. They actually operate they're Scottish, I think, and they actually operate buses and trains and a couple other things.
Speaker 3:Bolt Bus same thing they operated multiple types of transit in Europe and then they came over and helped with Greyhound and Flixbus as well is starting to make a debut in the late aughts into now, and that was a German bus company which, again, we'll talk about them in just a moment as well. But as we move into the 2000s, bus travel starts to pick up and there's a couple of reasons for this. Some of those are technological advances. With the advent of the internet and the wide adoption, People are able to book buses online. After 2008, we start seeing smart apps or smartphone apps for you to be able to just immediately look at a schedule on your phone phone right without needing to call a bus station or figure out yeah, yeah, yeah, um, yep, uh, you also.
Speaker 2:I mean they, they advertise at least that you have wi-fi on board. Uh, so they trick you into thinking they have it, and many times they will have it, but it just don't work, um well, so do the airlines.
Speaker 3:Yeah, true, the number of times they go to airlines. It's like and sorry folks, the wi-fi on this plane doesn't work today, but you can watch movies, yes, here you go.
Speaker 2:So you had that sort of stuff. A lot of good, at least PR. As far as using intercity buses is better for the environment because you're not all taking your own individual car trips, I guess I say it's good PR, but it also makes sense. If you're not all taking your own individual car, you're burning less fossil fuels and whatnot. Overall, yeah, and then just kind of a shift in perception among younger generations.
Speaker 3:Yeah, millennials have been accused of killing many, many things. We've been accused of killing fabric softener, the institution of marriage, golfing, but one thing we haven't killed is the Greyhound bus line or bus lines in general, bus lines in general. Millennials have a very different perception of public transit and just getting around, and so we're going to look for cheaper options, and I think one of those reasons is that about the time that millennials were really coming of age was when we had the 2008 financial crisis. Of age was when we had the 2008 financial crisis, and one thing that has sort of played out multiple times in the bus industry is that whenever there's financial hardship on the country, buses tend to sort of go up in ridership because people are looking for cheaper alternatives to get around. So in 2008, we actually did see a boost in bus ridership because suddenly it was more expensive to take an airline and people were looking for options right yeah, on the like financial element of it.
Speaker 2:Uh, I have like a decent amount of experience taking greyhound but a lot of mega buses. And the reason I was taking a lot of mega buses was because it was a time frame where I had like just enough money to like kind of sort of travel but like finish my travels with no money in my bank account, uh. And I took a couple overnight mega buses, uh, on different trips, partly because then I didn't have to pay for a place to stay that night either. Um, but but like mega bus tickets for a while at least you could get them for like 10 bucks, 12 bucks, um, you know. And like even over longer distances I did an overnight Megabus from Vegas to LA at one point, la to San Francisco for crazy cheap and they were not always like the nicest experience. You know you had a plug that was like a nice that was. The amenity basically was that you had a plug. But I oftentimes found them very crowded and like you know it just it wasn't, it wasn't great.
Speaker 2:I also have a decent amount of experience taking some kind of like regional buses too. I mentioned earlier on like the bus services in New England, being able to like use them to get to the airport or something to cover further distances, and I'm actually going to be using a bus in the next two weeks going from Portland Maine down to Boston as well. So there's still plenty of applications for them and like, are they the nicest thing ever? No, but as long as you're not doing a super, super long distance one. I have primarily found them to be fairly reliable on timing and whatnot. And yeah, I mean it's not luxurious, but it gets the job done for a lower price?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and they are starting to target different sort of income brackets too, because leading up to COVID you had things like FlixBus, you had the Greyhound, you have Amex, which takes you down to Mexico from here, and Megabus, but you also had things like the Vonlane, which really took off in Texas and. But you also had things like the Von Lane, which really took off in Texas and some other regions where it was like a luxury bus. So they went for like the luxury business traveler making these short connections.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like a higher price point. Bigger seats they actually have Wi-Fi. That works probably. They have plugs, all of this.
Speaker 3:I stuff, yeah, they have like a little like a stewardess that goes up and down the aisles. It's actually pretty nice. I have not done one of those yet. That's nice. Have you done one? Yeah, yeah, cool, um, but yeah, and then post-covid, all of the bus lines uh, a lot of them went out of business and you've seen a lot of struggle, um, but apparently they are on the upswing again. So we will see, maybe in two or three years we'll be back at like the pre-pandemic level of bus service in the US. But in this post-pandemic world we go and look back at the previous years of revenue for bus services and we'll take Greyhound for an example CNBC, which does amazing transit-related content.
Speaker 2:For some reason, for some reason, somebody there is a big transit nerd.
Speaker 3:I love it. But CNBC did a video about Greyhound and they talked about the revenues year over year and in 2018, greyhound had a revenue of $912 million. Fast forward to post-pandemic. In 2021, they had a revenue of $422 million.
Speaker 2:Literally more than cut in half. More than cut in half, yeah.
Speaker 2:Which must have led to flixbus, the german company, purchasing all of greyhound right, uh, and now today I mean with that we're kind of seeing like dual service. You're still seeing greyhound service, but you're also now seeing dedicated flixbus service on different routes, uh, kind of all across the country. Um, another interesting thing that I had no idea now their revenues are split very interestingly, and it's split between passenger service and other sources, including some of the like shipping and whatnot. But passenger services only make up 55 percent of Greyhound's revenue. Yeah, which is insane.
Speaker 3:The rest is soap and meat packing, yeah, no, the rest is other sources which Greyhound has for a long time also had a package delivery service where you can ship sort of bulky items across the country for very cheap way, cheaper than UPS or FedEx.
Speaker 2:So the next time somebody asks you how Dial Soap Vienna Sausages. Mickey Mouse and Greyhound are related. Now you know.
Speaker 3:Now you can go back and reference this video.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's a bit of a history for you on intercity buses in the United States. At some point we can dive deeper into different areas and where they might be more beneficial or not, but that gives you a little bit of an overview of the history going forward. If you haven't liked this video already, please consider doing so. If you're listening, please consider giving us a five-star rating or leaving a comment if you're able to do so where you are listening. Thank you all so much for watching. We really appreciate it and enjoy the rest of your Transit Tangents Tuesday.