Tomorrow morning I will be boarding a Greyhound bus from Boston to New York City to visit my Dad. When I spoke to my mother this afternoon regarding my plans I was absolutely gobsmacked when she told me that Greyhound had ceased all passenger operations in Canada last month.
During the 1990's, I spent countless hours on the Greyhound bus between Ottawa and Toronto. For a year, I lived right across the street from the Greyhound station in Ottawa. Greyhound actually ceased operating there last May amid the COVID-19 pandemic. When I would travel down to Toronto or back to Ottawa the bus would always stop at the Log Cabin Restaurant in the quaint town of Tweed, Ontario. It too has ceased to be.
The only Greyhound buses that will be seen in Canada now will originate from U.S. cities. You can get to Vancouver from Seattle, to Toronto from Buffalo and New York City and to Montreal from New York City and Boston. There were a couple of occasions when I took the Greyhound from Boston to Montreal and switched to the bus to Ottawa which left hourly. If I were to do this now I would have to go the VIA Rail station to get to Ottawa via ground transport.
At least Ottawa and other cities in the Windsor-Quebec City corridor still have passenger rail as an option. A few of the smaller bus companies like MegaBus can fill some of the gaps in these areas. But the same cannot be said for my hometown of Thunder Bay which lost its VIA Rail service more than 30 years ago. To get to Thunder Bay one must fly in or take a very, very, very long drive.
A country as vast as Canada needs federally subsidized bus travel to connect rural and isolated urban centers like Thunder Bay. But this is no more likely to happen than the federal government reinvesting in VIA Rail.
As Harry Chapin sung in "Greyhound", "It's got to be the goin', not the getting there that's good." But if you can't even go....
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