Buses Aren’t a Right

Greyhound recently announced that they were canceling all their bus service for Western Canada except one route due to lack of profitability.

In most of Western Canada, Greyhound was the only bus company operating, so people without cars will have to rely on ridesharing to make low-cost trips going forward.

Since the news broke, there has been a loud “public” (media and government) uproar of concern about the lack of bus transportation to remote communities.

In this uproar, the Premier of Alberta was quoted on the need for the government to step in and protect the right to transportation.

So in quick summary, we have a private company shutting down because it can no longer make money in a super-regulated industry, a government up in arms because they weren’t consulted before the closure, and a Premier talking about a “basic right to transportation”.

It is straight out of Atlas Shrugged.

Lost in the uproar is the reasons why Greyhound is closing down.

The regulation around the bus industry in Canada means that Greyhound would have had to apply to provincial governments to reduce the amount of bus service, or to cancel individual routes, but they don’t need too if they pull out altogether. Those same regulations make it hard for small local competitors to exist.

And more importantly, since 2010. Greyhound traffic has dropped by almost 50% as a combination of low-cost airfare, cheaper cars, and easier coordination of ridesharing has taken away almost half the demand for bus travel.

So half as many people are using buses as 8 years ago, and that trend is likely to continue. The market is clearly saying that there is less of a need for this service, but governments want to step in to provide bus service and protect the “right to transportation”.

The same governments that have viciously fought against ride-sharing companies and created the burdensome regulation that set this problem up to exist in the first place now want to take taxpayer money from everyone and use it to set up bus lines that no one will use to protect a form of transportation that hasn’t existed for a century, but is supposedly a human right. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.