Those following the fate of the Chinatown bus should read Steve Bailey’s column this week:
What Southwest Airlines did to the economics of air fares, Liang’s little bus line, Fung Wah Bus, is now doing to the established order of the I-95 bus business. And in an era of overpaid chief executives, Liang, who speaks little English and lives in New York, still drives a bus regularly.
The People’s Bus is one great story, but this, of course, is Boston. Here the powers that be have harassed Liang and his company at every turn….
Peter Pan, like all monopolists, likes the status quo. It has cut its prices on the Boston-New York run, for now, to $35 one-way on the weekdays and $15 on the weekends, only because it must. The moment Fung Wah is gone, those prices are going up, and up substantially. If Fung Wah, a start-up business, has problems that need fixing, the city and state should help it deal with those problems. They should not, however, help a bully protect its turf.
He probably downplays the way that these Chinatown bus operators have been able to carve a niche out of the lack of regulatory oversight and lack of unionized drivers. And as I’ve noted before, some New York reports have listed some connection between a couple of the operators and organized crime - though the extent of the connection is up to speculation.
But I’m with Bailey on this: the drawbacks of having an overpriced monopoly, particularly in the transportation between two major cities, exceed those of the lax regulation. And if safety or some other goal were really the issue, the city should figure out what it will take to achieve those goals, rather than simply punish competitors in the field. If the Chinatown operators have to stop the ten-dollar rides to New York, even a twenty dollar ticket is a far superior offering to what the monopolists were offering two years ago.
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