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Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Greyhound Cuts Stops in Small Southern Towns

Amtrak isn’t the only transportation system whose service to small-town and rural areas is at risk. “The Greyhound has always been the savior of small-town America,” notes the St. Petersburg Times. But not for long. The bus line is “streamlining” service in most of the Southeast (including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee), which means that buses will no longer stop in small towns all across the South.

“For many citizens of the Black Belt who do not own automobiles transportation just got a little tougher,” warns the Demopolis (Ala.) Times. The St. Petersburg Times reports on how the elimination of stops in 33 Florida small towns will affect the people who depend on buses – “the carless, the jobless, and those who are too afraid or too poor to fly.” Among the bus riders the reporter encounters – a woman who has just left her husband, a drug-dealing Vietnam vet, a mysterious, black-hatted man looking like a “Latino Johnny Cash” -- “the only common denominator that I saw was poverty.”
posted by gary ashwill at 9:19 AM | Email this post | Post a Comment
1 Comments:
Blogger katuah said...

now, i dunno about the places being slashed from the Greyhound routes, but some places are seeing a resurgence in small, locally-run transportation services, like community/county shuttle vans and such, to fill the niche left open by loss of other public (or semi-private) transit services. many of them seem to be centered around larger population/transportation hubs, like Atlanta or Phoenix, though...

6/27/2005 7:10 PM  

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CHRIS KROMM blogs three days a week for Facing South. Chris is Executive Director of the Institute for Southern Studies and publisher of the Institute’s award-winning magazine, Southern Exposure.

SUE STURGIS blogs four days a week for Facing South. Sue is the Institute’s Editorial Director and a former reporter for The Independent Weekly and The Raleigh News & Observer.

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