On the outskirts of an American town, a bus is scheduled to arrive. Only there’s no station—no ticket counter or waiting area, no screen offering updates on a delay that’s already stretching on. Just a small cluster of people standing with their bags at the edge of the pavement, looking up and down the street and refreshing their phones. When the bus finally arrives, the driver climbs down to check tickets. Someone asks a question, but he brushes them off. No time. No explanation. No one else around.

This scene isn’t an aberration. It’s what intercity bus travel looks like after decades of deregulation and abandonment. The unraveling of Greyhound—the nation’s largest intercity bus company, which for much of the 20th century was synonymous with long-distance travel—is often framed as a story of corporate mismanagement and declining service, but the deeper story is structural: a mode of transportation that millions of Americans rely on, stripped of the infrastructure that once supported it. What remains is a private network that can still move people between cities but has retreated from many of the communities that need it most.

The people left behind aren’t casual travelers looking to save a few dollars. They depend on the bus for trips that can’t be postponed—medical appointments, court dates, family emergencies, work obligations. For riders with no car and few alternatives, a delay isn’t just an inconvenience; it often means the trip doesn’t happen at all. And the thinner the transit options, the higher the stakes when service is cut.

Greyhound’s decline didn’t begin with one bad year or one bad CEO. Since its mid-20th-century heyday, when downtown terminals linked thousands of destinations and buses were a routine part of American travel for everyone from students and service members to families and vacationers, the company has faced steady pressure from external forces. Chief among them were the rise of car ownership, cheaper air tickets, and, most crucially, the deregulation of intercity buses. Previously, bus companies were required to keep service broadly available, subsidizing unprofitable routes with revenue from ones in higher demand. The Bus Regulatory Reform Act of 1982 lifted those requirements, shifting service away from smaller markets. Routes that didn’t pay for themselves—including across much of the rural Midwest and other lightly populated regions—were the first to disappear.

In 2021, FlixBus, a German travel-technology company, acquired Greyhound. Today, the two brands operate as a single intercity network spanning more than 1,800 destinations. Flix says it remains committed to serving rural areas, noting that hundreds of small towns are included in its network. Even so, the system reaches fewer places—especially in rural areas—than the one Greyhound once ran: a network that, at the height of its expansion in the early 1940s, operated roughly 4,750 bus stations nationwide.

The contraction has not only reduced routes; it has reshaped the infrastructure that once supported them. Greyhound’s terminal properties were not included in the Flix acquisition and remained with Greyhound’s former parent company, FirstGroup, which later sold them to other owners.

While Flix still operates out of major urban transit hubs such as New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, Los Angeles’s Union Station, and Boston’s South Station, the company relies on a model built around app-based ticketing and curbside pickup rather than privately owned stations in markets with lighter demand. Flix’s CEO, Kai Boysan, says the curbside model keeps prices down and improves on-time performance, with rates that exceeded 85 percent during this past winter’s holiday season and that are close to 100 percent in certain regions.

Even as it defends the curbside model as a way to avoid the costs of privately owned terminals, Flix argues that intercity buses should have access to publicly supported transit centers that connect local buses and commuter rail lines. The company is pushing for “reasonable access” rights to those facilities and says that federal programs like the Section 5311 Intercity Bus Program, which sets aside a portion of federal rural transit funding to support intercity bus service in rural areas with smaller populations, are critical to sustaining service in underserved regions. Without those protections, Boysan says, buses will continue to be pushed to peripheral locations—and passengers will continue to face delays, transfers, and ticketing without the infrastructure that once anchored the system.

The fight over stations isn’t just about urban real estate; it’s about whether intercity buses are considered a core component of a city’s transportation system at all. Local governments “need to view bus stations as one of their obligations or one of their infrastructure priorities,” says Joseph P. Schwieterman, a transportation scholar at DePaul University who studies intercity bus and rail systems. “Some have good transit centers, but the transit agencies won’t let bus lines use them. Others are kind of hostile to the bus because they view it as a source of crime.” So the bus still runs but the station doesn’t—and with it go the waiting room, bathrooms, charging stations, and staffed counter that riders depend on.

The collapse of intercity bus service isn’t an accident of the market. It’s the result of treating transportation as a private service rather than a public responsibility. One solution, according to Genevieve Giuliano, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, is to provide the kind of public backing that’s extended to air travel—an investment that, while not a remedy for every issue facing intercity buses, could help stabilize the network itself. “There are subsidies that are paid by the federal government to carriers to include unprofitable links in their networks as part of basic air mobility,” Giuliano says. She wonders why we haven’t applied the same logic to bus travel.