America's Greyhound bus stations are disappearing • Hacker News Board

Re: America's Greyhound bus stations are disappearing

#61

Post by lotsoweiners » Sun, Sep 29, 2024, 3:07 PM UTC

chrchr wrote: post #43

briandear wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There's no reason buses need to be terrible. Intercity bus service in Mexico is practically luxurious, with big reclining seats that you can actually sleep in and thick curtains that close. In the U.S., there was a startup offering overnight trips between Los Angeles and San Francisco with sleeping pods. They shut down at the beginning of the pandemic, but imagine how nice it would be to wake up at your destination r…

> but imagine how nice it would be to wake up at your destination refreshed instead of fighting through LAX at dawn and squeezing into a 737 for one of those "cheap" flights.

I generally have bad sleeps when I’m staying in a luxurious bed at the Marriott or Hyatt. I cannot imagine that spending a night in something called a sleeping pod would end in anything other than me being up all night unable to sleep.

Re: America's Greyhound bus stations are disappearing

#62

Post by veqq » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 10:19 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #59

tehjoker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but also airlines will completely fail without government support. The only aspect of aviation that is private is the buying a ticket and purchasing and operating planes, creating a thin fiction of a free market. Everything else is supported. The airports, the airline manufacturers (that also make expensive weapon systems via govt. contracts), the fuel system (supported by endless diplomacy, monetary policy, and…

The airline industry seems to work everywhere in the world regardless of the subsidy situation so I doubt it'd fail without support. A lot of subsidies seem to come from regions competing with each other eg. subsidise Boeing so the jobs don't move to Airbus/Europe, expand London airports so they don't switch to Paris etc.

Airlines are subsidized all around the world, and incinerate money everywhere. Very few airlines are profitable over even short periods. In the US, Southwest is the only one whose shareholder equity's grown in the last 5, 10, 20 or how many years you want.

Re: America's Greyhound bus stations are disappearing

#63

Post by bdndndndbve » Fri, Oct 04, 2024, 12:01 PM UTC

searealist wrote: post #6

bdndndndbve wrote: post #2

It's amazing how something that should be a public utility has been carved up by private equity and sold to a foreign company. Greyhound has completely stopped operating in Canada and the impact has been tremendous.

People don't use greyhound because of the other people who use greyhound. Making this a public utility only worsens this problem.

Making the bus more useful for more people has the opposite effect. The people who are currently on the bus are people with no other option. The population on the bus, on average, is only going to get less "undesirable" (to the HN crowd) if the bus station is nice, well-lit, comes at reasonable times, has coffee shops and stuff.