Alone on BoltBus: 1 passenger and 50 empty seats

By DANIEL SORID, For The Associated Press Mon May 5, 1:41 PM ET

NEW YORK - Gil Rivera picked me up in his red lady magnet with a lightning bolt decal by some basketball courts downtown. "Let's go to Miami!" I shouted. But Gil, sporting Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses and a black cap, had places to be in Philly, and so did I.

As we rolled down the highway, Gil and I had his 51-seater BoltBus all to ourselves. I was thrilled with the $2.50 round-trip fare from New York to Philadelphia, bought online, and I was looking forward to checking out BoltBus' promised Wi-Fi service.

But I never dreamed I might be lonely, or that I'd have such an extravagant choice of places to sit on a 100-mile bus trip.

Fortunately the driver was good company. We swapped wild bus tales for a while. I finished up a guacamole taco and sent a few e-mails and photos from my cell phone. After a few hours, he dropped me off near Philly's 30th Street Station, and we said our goodbyes.

It was my first experience on BoltBus, Greyhound Lines' response to the low-priced curbside bus operators that have been eating the iconic company's lunch for years. Some of these discount lines are known as Chinatown buses because they run from one city's Chinatown to another, and they've proven extremely popular - especially among students - despite safety concerns. (Government agencies have flagged one company, Fung Wah, for safety issues like speeding, but Greyhound's record isn't spotless, either.)

Market research that Greyhound conducted last summer showed that 65 percent of ridership on some routes was going to curbside operators, said David Hall, who is leading the BoltBus project for Greyhound, now a unit of the UK-based transportation company FirstGroup. The competition put the company's gears into overdrive.

"If you can't beat 'em, you join 'em," said Hall.

The Chinatown bus lines may exude a certain shaggy urban appeal, but BoltBus is trying to turn curbside bus travel into something cool. Power outlets and free Wi-Fi made my two trips fly by, and the ticketing couldn't be simpler. You pay in advance online and show the driver a text message confirmation on your cell phone.

Drivers, picked in part for a bubbly personality, carry union cards and must meet Greyhound safety and training standards. And for now at least, there's plenty of room to stretch out. I was the sole passenger on my return trip as well.

Fares on BoltBus, which began service in late March and is gradually adding service along the Northeast, cost as little as $1. The same trip on Greyhound would have cost close to $20. Greyhound probably lost hundreds of dollars to operate my one-way to Philly. Gas, wages, insurance, maintenance - it all adds up. So what's the logic?

To hear Greyhound tell it, the company isn't so much competing against itself as it is opening up bus riding to a new demographic. Greyhound sees BoltBus as appealing to Web-savvy commuters, students and business travelers who might consider a bus instead of driving or taking a train or plane.

That leaves the more traditional bus customers for regular Greyhound service. The company still sells 90 percent of its tickets at terminals or through an 800 number, makes local stops and operates from terminals.

"Truthfully, some folks don't like bus terminals, and don't want to deal with bus terminal people," Hall said.

Whether bus terminals are better or worse than curbside pick-up is debatable, however. I waited for my bus on a bench by a basketball court on Canal Street in Lower Manhattan. A few benches over sat an old man reading a dirty magazine.

In many ways, Greyhound had little choice but to enter the curbside business. The company has lost millions of passengers as it closed down routes nationwide to boost efficiency. And six of Greyhound's top 10 locations are on the Northeast Corridor, where the Chinatown lines have snapped up its passengers.

Hall said the Philadelphia-New York route has been surprisingly slow, but predicted it would become profitable by July. The Washington-New York route, he said, will start making money in May. Service between Boston and New York just started.

Still, BoltBus, a joint venture with the Peter Pan bus company, marks a curious turn for the motorcoach industry, which in the past has vilified curbside buses as unsafe, unregulated, and even un-American.

At a Congressional hearing in 2006, long before Greyhound entered the business, Rep. Thomas Petri (R-Wis.) likened the curbside line-up of bus passengers to what he saw as a Peace Corps volunteer in Somalia. The American Bus Association leveled environmental and national security concerns - it even invoked the 9/11 attacks - in its testimony.

These days, the union that represents Greyhound drivers accepts BoltBus as a necessary compromise, but still believes long-distance buses should run from terminals.

"The authorities would not do their jobs and regulate the intercity bus market, and so Greyhound felt that they had no choice but to come into the market," says Bruce Hamilton, the president of Local 1700 of the Amalgamated Transit Union. "We lost a lot of our work to illegal and unregulated carriers that are out there working off the streets, and Greyhound's operation is not illegal."

Chinatown operators note that they operate openly and legally, and see jealousy behind these criticisms. Aimin David Wong, a co-owner of Eastern Travel & Tours, told Congress that curbside companies are the Southwest Airlines of bus travel: They innovated to keep costs and prices low while meeting safety regulations.

"This is extremely threatening to traditional carriers and they will try and find a way to maintain their favorable position in the bus transportation industry in this country," he said in 2006.

Meanwhile, the more immediate question for Greyhound is, where are the customers? Curbside bus businesses rely on word-of-mouth advertising, and BoltBus is counting on its glossy buses to generate buzz from pedestrians.

"They way they're hoping," Rivera told me, "even if they get four or five people on a schedule, once you go back home you tell two or three of our friends, 'I rode on this bus, you get wireless Internet.' Eventually, they're going to want to see it for themselves."