If you didn’t already have enough reasons to question proposals for taxpayer-funded high-speed rail, the latest Bloomberg Businessweek offers another one: Megabus.
After the Des Moines bus departs, a dispatcher shouts that Indianapolis-bound travelers can sit on the “warming bus.” He points to a white coach idling 50 feet up the street. The crowd migrates that way, leaving on the sidewalk Dale Moser, chief executive officer of Megabus’s parent company, Coach USA. Bundled only in a thin leather jacket and earmuffs, Moser, 55, says he has been watching the operations for more than an hour. He immediately begins detailing the company’s merits: how 90 percent of customers book online, many simply showing tickets texted to their phones to board; how the buses all offer free Wi-Fi and power outlets at every seat; how every trip includes at least one $1 fare, with prices going up as the departure date nears and as the bus fills; how there are no terminals or storefronts, just a bare-bones back-office staff; how the bus fleet is in constant use. “You cut all that overhead out of your business, you find you can pass that savings on to customers, thus driving volume,” Moser says. About once a month he rides the buses himself, as a sort of secret shopper, chatting people up and asking about their travel experiences. “If they look at me like I’m a real creeper, I tell them who I am,” he says.
When the ink in my pen freezes, I ask if he would mind continuing our conversation inside. The head of the biggest “curbside bus” carrier—a mode of transportation that is by far the fastest-growing in the nation—surveys his teeming Chicago hub. He suggests the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street.
Megabus and Coach USA are owned by the British company Stagecoach Group, and they have fundamentally changed the way Americans—especially the young—travel, so much so that they may help kill plans for new railroads.
