Don't Miss the Bus
by NIH travel editor, Deon Scant
It's holiday time again, so I thought I'd promote a much disparaged form of tourist travel.
Intercity bus travel is the least prestigious form of intercity mass transit, although it is difficult to understand why. It is faster than the train – trains and buses on the same route are generally scheduled to take about the same time, but the bus often arrives sooner than the scheduled time, while the train usually arrives later. The bus is also considerably cheaper than the heavily subsidized train – bus fares seem to be about a third less than second class train fares.
And then there's the service you get on the train. Here's an exchange I heard on one of my last train trips:
Passenger: What kinds of sandwiches do you have on your cart?Trains do offer bad food, while the bus just stops every couple of hours at some place selling bad food. The experience of getting on the bus can be arduous (while lined up you are often exposed to summer humidity and winter cold), but the experience of waiting for the train can be long. On the whole, Via Rail is run as if it's a marketing promotion for bus travel, but still people look down on the bus.Steward: If you look in the menu in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of you, sir, you will see what sandwiches I have on my cart.
Passenger (having consulted the menu): I'll have a turkey sandwich.
Steward: No turkey.
Airplane travel seems at first glance to be far faster than bus travel, but when you include the time spent getting to the airport, cooling your heels in departure lounges, and getting back into town after you've landed in the boonies the advantage of the plane seems less pronounced. The plane also costs about three times as much as the bus, before any add-ons like cancellation charges and the cab fare to and from the airport. Bus terminals are usually in or near the centre of town, so cab fares from the bus terminal are cheaper, and you can often take public transit.
For long runs the airplane beats the bus or the train. I've ridden from Toronto to London with enough people finishing three-day trips from Calgary to know that. One fellow kept saying every five minutes "The first thing I do when I walk in the door is go get in the shower."
But airplanes don't fly short runs. If the trip is under four hours by road, you usually have a choice of the bus or the train, and the bus is cheaper and faster.
But still people look down on the bus. The bus has a devoted following, but chiefly among the young and the old. The young and the old tend not to have money, and the bus is cheap. Once you're old enough to make real money you abandon it, only to take it up again when the welfare state abandons you to your golden years.
What it comes down to in the end is a matter of class. The bus is the only one of the three major forms of intercity mass transit which does not have a class system. Airplanes have first class, business class, coach class, and other classes. Trains have first and second class. On the bus, though, you just get in line with everyone else.
In North America one's social class is highly determined by one's income, since income is about the only means through which social class can exert itself. We don't have aristocracies with traditional privileges, we just have people with more or less money. To appear to be of high social standing you have to spend money. To travel between cities the socially approved forms of transport are the automobile for short journeys and the airplane for long ones. If you must take either the bus or the train, you choose the train because it costs more. Travelling on the train is an advertisement for one's bank account. Travelling on the train in first class is an even better advertisement.
For most people, of course, this tactic is futile. Money is only really useful if it allows you to buy things like television news directors or newspaper editors or politicians. Buying one or two of those can make a difference to your life. Using your money to buy a ticket on VIA Rail that costs 50% more than the same ticket on the bus (or even more if you travel first class) will make a difference to your life, but the only difference it will make is to make you poorer than the bus will, which seems just a bit counter-productive, don't you think?
If you want to appear to be a member of a superior social class, start saving up to buy a politician. Taking the bus will help you do that, because it's cheaper.
So if you're stuck for something to do over the summer holidays, try a bus trip. You don't have to worry about reservations, for a start. A particular summer treat is the day trip by overnight bus. On the midnight buses from Toronto to Montreal and Ottawa, for example, an artistically dreamlike effect is produced as you wake up every so often to find the bus somewhere in the bush picking up and letting off passengers, or simply to find it barrelling down a nearly empty superhighway. And you get to town way early, so you can get an early breakfast, put in a heavy day of sightseeing, then sleep all the way back.
For shorter sightseeing trips the bus is usually preferable to the train or the car. You can go from Toronto to Niagara Falls early in the day, for example, without having to worry about the nerve-wracking traffic on the Queen Elizabeth Way (even if the bus gets becalmed you can do the crossword in the paper while all the drivers around you are fuming) and without having to pay the train fare – provided you avoid the special tourist buses and take the regular service. With the money you save you can take a cab or two when you get to the Falls.
Or you can stop taking holidays altogether and buy that news director or politician all the sooner. However, the supply of news directors and politicians is limited, and there are plenty of buses.
Don't Miss the Bus © John FitzGerald, 2003
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