Traffic Lab: Meet the Travel Innovation of the Future — The Bus

An expert in air travel tells us why we should be excited about buses.

Megan Ryerson is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who researches intercity travel, meaning longer trips outside of your regular commute. “It’s really these 300 to 500 mile trips that I have spent the bulk of my career on,” she says. It’s the kind of trip where you might consider flying, but Ryerson is an advocate for a greener, more affordable way to travel: the bus.

“Aviation should be put to use for what it’s great at, which is transporting a lot of people a very long distance,” says Ryerson. But for shorter trips, there are better alternatives.

For one, there’s the cost of flying. “Air transportation is public transportation. It’s just very expensive and exclusive public transportation,” Ryerson explains.

These short-haul trips are also expensive for airlines to operate, which is why, more and more, airlines are reducing the number of flights out of smaller airports — or dropping the smaller airports from their network altogether. Fewer flights means higher prices and even more inconvenience for travelers. And if you’re taking a short trip, it’s not that much faster.

And yet air travel is heavily subsidized by the government. “Aviation is so shiny because we put so much federal money into it,” says Ryerson. She believes we could have a more equitable, more connected, and greener transportation system if we invested in a nationwide system of intercity buses instead.

But the bus has an image problem. It’s been around for a long time and it’s not as flashy as something like high-speed rail. Often, when people think of buses, they think of cramped, uncomfortable, and inconvenient travel that comes with lots of stops and limited schedules. That means more time spent waiting at the bus station, which usually isn’t anyone’s favorite place to wait.

As Ryerson explains, all of this is a product of our national priorities. When it comes to the bus, “we as a society have never invested in it and never taken it seriously,” she says.

An expansive intercity bus system would provide mobility for people without cars. It’s more environmentally friendly because it emits less CO₂ than a short-haul flight. It’s a flexible system that can connect rural areas to cities and people across different states. And of course, it can be just as comfortable as flying (or more so), with bathrooms and Wi-Fi onboard.

The reason we don’t have this bus system in place already is more cultural than technical, explains Ryerson. “If we just shifted our perspective on travel, we could provide mobility for so many more people.”

As for air travel, Ryerson would like to see us move away from a “one-size-fits-all” approach that overemphasizes flights for shorter intercity trips. She’d also like to see more funding decisions that aren’t just state-specific. With people moving from state to state, why not have more states teaming up to invest in better bus travel?

When dreaming up new ways to get around, sometimes it helps to reconsider the familiar. The future of travel may just be a bus stop away.