It's a chicken-and-egg/gordian knot problem isn't it? Buses are still the cheapest mode of inter-city transportation, well below airplanes and below trains (not

It's a chicken-and-egg/gordian knot problem isn't it? Buses are still the cheapest mode of inter-city transportation, well below airplanes and below trains (not to mention the bad state of passenger train travel in the US where buses have been left as the only non-airplane options between some major cities). As the cheapest option that should mean they have the widest audience in theory, but also as the cheapest option they have also become the only option for certain portions of the populace. In the race to the bottom of capitalism they focused too much on the cheapest passengers and lost a lot of reasons to enforce cleanliness and standards in the name of cost efficiencies. In theory, they could try to expand back to more "premium experiences and amenities" raise some prices and try to expand from just the poorest passengers, but they risk losing the most regular passengers they have. In practice, they also always have a hard time competing with the "premium experiences" of air travel because even accounting for the time overhead of TSA and "be two hours early to be on time for your flight", buses still lose when it comes to overall travel time. I don't think there's currently an easy market-based solution to solve the chicken-and-egg/gordian knot problem of the very ugly local maxima of poor service for the cheapest passengers only that inter-city buses currently have maximized for rather than trying again for cleaner, better inter-city buses. (Maybe it needs more public infrastructure and support; maybe it needs an entirely new competitor to shake things up, like now might just be the ripe time for the disruption of something like inter-city electric dirigibles to be a best of both worlds lower priced [especially as diesel gets more expensive], no TSA but some of the time savings of more direct air travel. That probably isn't going to happen, because this timeline isn't that cool, but we can collectively dream and there are startups on HN that think they can do some version of that disruption.)