Bus Stop

A strike halts Greyhound us travel used to be the refuge of the

poor, the young and the thrifty. In 1947 a cost-conscious traveler could take a six-day trip from Chicago to Washington on a Greyhound bus, spend five nights in a hotel, make sightseeing trips to attractions like Mount Vernon, and spend only $42.50.

Today going by bus is far less economical. Even without the hotels and sideshows, it costs $70 to make that 18-hour bus trip from Chicago to Washington (lowest plane fare: $89 on Northwest Airlines). As a result, the popularity of intercity buses has been falling. From a peak in 1974, when gasoline shortages led 168.7 million passengers to leave the driving to them, the number of bus travelers dropped to 125.6 million in 1981.

No bus line has been hit harder than Greyhound, the nation's largest, which operates 3,800 buses and carried 57 million passengers last year. In an effort to cut costs, Greyhound last month asked the Amalgamated Transit Union to roll back wages and benefits to levels of two years ago, a cut that Greyhound said averaged about 17%. The union, which represents 12,500 workers, including 7,000 drivers, contended that the pay reductions really totaled between 20% and 25%, and turned down the proposal on the very same day. When the old contract expired last week, the union went on strike, and Greyhound service to 14,000 points around the U.S. came to a halt.

Like many other old-line transportation companies, Greyhound is caught in the middle of federal deregulation of its industry. Since November 1982, intercity bus lines have found it far easier to go where they want and charge what they can, within a "zone of rate freedom" established by the Interstate Commerce Commission. Small regional carriers with lower overhead are now doing battle with

Greyhound over local routes. Almost anyone with $50,000 to buy a used bus can go into business and cut fares to subsistence levels.

Greyhound has also been hurt by deregulation of the airlines. Upstart short-haul carriers are now offering flights that are even cheaper than bus travel. While Greyhound charges $56.15 for a journey between Newark and Norfolk, for instance, a People Express ticket is just $23. Says Greyhound Spokeswoman Beth Meyer: "There was a time when that was one of our most heavily traveled routes. Now we've just about abandoned it."

Greyhound, of course, has also benefited from deregulation. It is easier for the company to trim its route list because it is no longer required to serve out-of-the-way hamlets and small towns. Greyhound has given notice that it would like to cut trips to 98 communities in California alone. But the route changes have not come quickly enough to compensate for the company's falling ridership. Last year Greyhound Lines ran up an operating loss of $16.3 million.

Greyhound Chairman John Teets has been urgently trying to cut overhead. In a well-publicized statement last month, he warned, "We have the highest-paid employees in the bus transportation business. We need--no, we must have--parity with other carriers." Greyhound claims its drivers make an average of $27,437 plus $8,037 in benefits, compared with $22,985 and $5,600 in benefits for drivers at the company's major competitors.

If a new contract is not reached within two weeks, Greyhound will try to resume operations with nonunion workers. It plans to hire new drivers to replace the strikers, and has developed a training course that lasts two weeks, four weeks less than the normal one. Union officials claim that the new drivers will not be as competent and that Greyhound is trying to bust the union. With Teets insisting that workers must "give Greyhound some badly needed competitive relief," a tough strike could be coming down the road. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.