greyhound is done in canada, which is going to be annoying in the short run but might work out in the long run.

the greyhound station in downtown windsor is also the city’s main bus station, including the start and stop point for the tunnel bus. i’d guess the city will have to buy it, but i doubt it wants to shell out the cash. i wonder if it can even just seize it.

the context is a little broader than the pandemic, though. ontario has recently announced plans to allow for competition in the intercity bus market (greyhound previously enjoyed a near monopoly), which is the kind of inefficient competition in the face of a natural monopoly that just leads to market failure – there’s simply not enough of an intercity bus market to allow for meaningful competition, nor would it be desirable to have competition in bus services, so you’re going to end up with ten unprofitable firms operating routes at 30% capacity, rather than one profitable firm operating at 80% capacity. it’s a typically economically illiterate decision by a typically economically illiterate provincial conservative party, but this one doesn’t even seem to be driven by corruption, as so many of them are – this is just dumb, flat out. this is what happens when you elect people that are driven by a backwards, irrational economic ideology that operates outside of empirical bounds. there may be a price drop in the short run for certain routes, if you can find a route at all, but it’s not going to be sustainable, and more likely is that most routes just won’t operate at all, because they’re just not profitable to operate. that’s the point of having the monopoly. so, in the end, we’re going to need to re-establish a monopoly with government subsidies if we want intercity public transport at all and this experiment with the inefficiency of markets in a natural monopoly will need to be undone. this is especially regressive in the face of the need to focus on less wasteful forms of transportation in the face of imminent catastrophic climate change. and, here in windsor, we might end up cut off from the rest of canada until the train gets extended here, and that could be upwards of ten or even twenty years.

it’s going to dramatically increase our reliance on detroit.

and, i’m probably going to need to get used to hitching if i want to get to toronto – including to appear in court.

thanks doug.