Intercity bus transportation

[danbrotherston]

At this point, they'd not be competing with GO Transit who does not operate a bus route from Toronto to WR.

But I'm not exactly hopeful here either.

Well, they do operate a train that will be all day service at some point in the future. Also, you can also take a bus to and from Toronto and Kitchener, you just have to take two of them, or one bus and a train, transferring at Bramalea. That may be not quite as good as one bus all the way, but you don't have to book in advance or buy a ticket. You just tap your Presto card. I switched to GO even before Greyhound stopped running. There are a lot of other communities in Ontario that used to be served by Greyhound but now have no service whatsoever. That seems like a better opportunity for a bus company wanting to expand.

I mean, it shouldn't be hard to compete with an up to 3.5 hour bus ride with a connection in the middle on a route that can be in conservatively 1.5 hours in decent traffic in a car. I've taken GO to Toronto on weekends, but I've been angry about it every time.

The train is certainly a stronger competitor, but that's years off from a real timetable. Hell, if they had a real interest in serving our community they could run the trains on the weekend...but they don't. Perhaps there SHOULD be competition?

That being said, I don't think most of the communities which lack bus service can be served profitably. We need to completely rethink our intercity bus service, and go with a different model.

Transit can't be run at a profit. At least that's my opinion (and don't @ me Japan, AFAIK a significant portion of their profitability comes from realestate). But what should be entirely uncontroversial is that transit cannot be run at a profit in small cities across Ontario where we subsidize driving to an utterly astronomical degree.