I’m posting this from the bus on my way to New York City. For $22 one-way, the new DC2NY bus offers comfortable seats, a free bottle of water, and… wait for it… free wireless internet! This is awesome. And so are my friends, whom I called last night and with less than 24 hours notice lined up places for me to stay for the next week.
I gave myself a 45 minute safety margin this morning to get downtown and catch the bus, which, thanks to DC’s first snowfall of the year (I can’t remember the last time I saw snow!) wouldn’t have been enough. Thankfully, my mom happened to pass me at the bus stop and dropped me off at the Metro station, following which I arrived at the DC2NY bus with 4 minutes to spare.
There are a bunch of discount buses (the “Chinatown buses”) that run from DC to New York. At first, they didn’t seem to me like they could be profitable. Even on the DC2NY bus, which costs an extra $10 or so (worth it for the internet access, in my opinion), seats only cost $20-$25. There’s 60 seats on the bus, but there’s only 16 passengers on here right now. If you assume the bus can maintain 50% capacity, 30 people paying $25 each only comes to $750.
It’s 220 miles from DC to NY, at (optimistically) 7 miles per gallon that’s 30 gallons, so about $100. Perhaps more realistically, at 3 miles per gallon, about $200. After deducting costs for paying a driver, insurance, tolls, and so forth, I guess you could clear a few hundred dollars on a single trip. Adding in the profit for a return trip for New York, it’s not a bad gig. Seems like a pretty narrow profit margin, but if you’re the guy at the top, hiring drivers while you sit on your butt and run a one or two man operation out of your living room, it could be a pretty reliable stream of income.
