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These days I’ll settle for peace, quiet and an on-time arrival. For the most part, the shiny, double-decker coach that I catch in front of New York’s Penn Station delivers, with all the antiseptic grace of an airline. And though I could afford a ticket on the faster Amtrak regional train, which boards almost directly beneath the idling bus, my curbside bus has Wi-Fi, power outlets, a peaceful boarding process and a price that still can’t be beat.

Approximately 4.2 million people along the Northeast corridor rode curbside buses in 2007, according to Greyhound. That’s up from zero a decade earlier. Each week more than 2,500 curbside bus trips connect New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Boston, which is a lot of traffic, travel and money — and a surprising nonfactor in the broader regional planning picture. So where did all these buses come from?

Long before the decades-old corporation Greyhound joined with Peter Pan to launch Bolt Bus, or the British conglomerate Stagecoach Group imported easyJet’s low-overhead model with MegaBus, and before the so-called “Chinatown” buses were the thrifty mode du jour, there was the Fung Wah Transportation Company, a jitney van owned by Pei Lin Liang, that shuttled Chinese workers between Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Nicholas J. Klein, a doctoral candidate at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, is writing his dissertation on curbside buses. He says a group of Chinese immigrants approached Liang in 1998 to charter his van to visit their children at college in Boston. By the fall of that year Fung Wah had a U.S. Department of Transportation permit and was making three trips to Boston each day, serving a sizable immigrant labor pool and enlisting its members as drivers and ticket sellers. The next year another Chinese-immigrant-operated bus company, New Century Travel, started offering daily trips between New York and Philadelphia. The modern curbside bus industry was born.

A number of seemingly unrelated factors readied the market for this redheaded stepchild. Up until the deregulation rush of the late 1970s and early 1980s, bus travel had been strictly controlled by the Motor Carrier Act of 1935, which set certain criteria for inspections, fares, routes and market entry that effectively prohibited upstarts from competing with the established carriers. In 1982 President Reagan signed the Bus Regulatory Reform Act, which, like the airline deregulation act before it, removed federal oversight of so-called “quantity controls” while maintaining a role in “quality regulation.”

In the 15 years between deregulation and the start of the curbside boom, immigration patterns and immigrants’ travel needs reinforced a demand for inexpensive intercity transportation throughout the Northeast. In 1998, roughly concurrent with the chartering of that Fung Wah Transportation van, New York City’s Department of Transportation posted signs for a “Bus Layover Area” along a short block of Forsyth Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown. According to a 2008 New York Times article, this “routine act of bureaucracy … in effect allowed private interstate buses to wait briefly by the curb seven days a week,” establishing the first of New York’s semiofficial curbside bus stops. And as tourism business suffered following 9/11, charter bus owners considered their own underutilized fleets and entered the curbside market.

The years that followed were a Wild West-style lesson on the pros and cons of privatization and deregulation. According to Klein’s research, “Between 2002 and 2003, bus companies reduced fares by half or more.” Alongside the de facto bus stations, mom-and-pop hole-in-the-wall shops sprouted up catering to Chinese and non-Chinese customers alike.
But there were troubles too: Neighborhood residents complained about crowds, traffic and idling buses. Community groups pointed to already-high asthma rates and asked anyone who would listen, “Why here?” In 2006 New York City Councilmember Alan Gerson testified, “These buses [in Chinatown] have more pickups and drop-offs than the Port Authority. This is unacceptable.” Even the NYPD found the buses to be a nuisance. Deputy inspector Michael Lau of the Fifth Precinct told the City Council that the buses congested the streets and increased the possibility of accidents and even violence.

And there was violence, including vehicular assaults, a drive-by shooting and arson. In 2003 an argument on one curbside bus left an employee dead, stabbed nine times in a dispute over the fare. The NYPD began to investigate possible connections to organized crime, and eventually the violence slowed — but safety troubles sped up. In 2005 a Fung Wah bus headed to New York from Boston burst into flames, and in 2006 a rollover in Massachusetts injured 34 and a crash in Pennsylvania hospitalized five.

By the end of that year New York Sen. Charles Schumer proposed shutting down the industry entirely. His reaction soon morphed into a “task force,” as well as a “strike force” aimed at enforcing and maintaining higher safety standards. Federal regulators began stopping and ticketing buses for a variety of violations ranging from noncompliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act to equipment infractions to drivers whose English-language skills were deemed unsafe for commercial-vehicle operation and passenger service. 

Amid this turmoil, “corporate” curbside buses entered the scene, and with good financial incentive: New York City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal charges companies $40 per departure and $6,500 annually for platform use, and between $13,000 and $19,000 each year for the use of station gates. Factor in reduced labor costs — there are fewer ticket sellers and baggage handlers in the curbside model — and the savings add up. In addition, according to new research by Klein, the vast majority of traditional bus passengers look unfavorably upon terminals. Passengers he surveyed mentioned “drug addicts, homeless people, crazy people and conspiracy theorists,” and focused almost entirely on the departure and arrival experience.

Approximately 4.2 million people along the Northeast corridor rode curbside buses in 2007, according to Greyhound. That’s up from zero a decade earlier. ”

Now, curbside buses — both “Chinatown” and “corporate,” though those monikers seem increasingly meaningless given the overlap between the two groups — travel to cities as far as Atlanta, Indianapolis and Toronto. Some have wireless Internet, electrical outlets and online ticketing. Their pickup points tend to be in prime locations, close to other transit options and popular destinations.

Passengers are winning in all of this, but communities, and maybe other intercity transit options, are suffering. “Our current operations can be intrusive and disruptive, but we don’t want them to be,” says David Hall, general manager of Bolt Bus. “In New York we’ve been working with the city for 15 months to spread out our operations. We want to be seamless and invisible, but we’re not there yet.” He’s right. Bolt Bus coaches end up scattered around Penn Station’s surrounding streets whenever they’re off schedule. And when they’re loading, long lines of pedestrians can wall off vendors from customers, cabs from their fares and streets from eager jaywalkers.

It’s even messier in Chinatown, where narrow streets carry pedestrian volumes that rival those found in Italian piazzas, and shop owners line the sidewalks with bins of produce and wares. There, the local community board has started denying requests for company-specific bus stops, insisting that “intercity buses have created a large amount of congestion and pollution in lower Manhattan.” They want to see city, state and even federal responses to the problem. Susan Stetzer, the district manager of Manhattan’s Community Board Three, says some of her board’s members wonder whether it’s fair for buses that use public streets for free to compete with other intercity modes that have to pay for their infrastructure.

Indeed, the sweeping success of curbside buses may prove a threat to established intercity travel industries. A passenger-intercept survey conducted by Bolt Bus found that 20 percent of its passengers had switched from Amtrak. That signals bad news for the always-ailing National Railroad Passenger Corporation, its 19,000 employees, and the federal government, which owns all of the company’s preferred stock. And though Bolt Bus did not ask specifically if its New York-to-Philadelphia passengers switched from the commuter train (an option available for that section of the corridor) to the bus, general manager Hall believes it stands to reason that their success has diluted ridership for SEPTA and New Jersey Transit as well.

This mode shift may present a prickly scenario: Curbside buses could be doing serious damage to the already ailing bottom line of state and federally supported transportation systems that are, in their current incarnations and very broadly speaking, safer, more environmentally friendly, better suited for high-density urban areas, and more encouraging of transit-oriented development. “I think the mode shift question is really crucial but also quite complicated,” Klein says. “These buses also generate new trips and replace car travel. Before we applaud or criticize these companies, I think we need to know more about who is riding these buses and how they are affecting travel behavior.”

But that’s far from my mind when it’s time for me to head to Philadelphia. A curbside bus has everything I need, and as one of Klein’s survey respondents said, “For $10 that you could spend for a cross-town cab probably getting four blocks, you could go to Philadelphia in an hour and a half, spend the day there, go to the museum, and you come back the same.” Isn’t that how intercity travel ought to work?

This article appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!