Why are Greyhound bus stations almost always in poor, high crime neighborhoods?
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Why are most Jet Ski rental places near the beach?
People who have resources tend to not take the least efficient (time-wise) form of transportation.
I’m sure there are worse examples but the downtown bus station in Houston is total stay-away.
I heard once that Greyhound is one of the primary ways people are sent home when they are released from prison.
I feel like most of the comments here kind of miss the obvious; the stations are usually old and have been there long before the neighborhood was poor and/or high crime.
I found one comment that barely touched on it here, but per Wikipedia, greyhound has been around since 1914, and “[by the beginning of WWII, the company had 4,750 stations…](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyhound_Lines?wprov=sfti1)”
That’s a lot of stations that were built in cities all around the country, and at the time a lot of middle class people in those cities were near the traditional urban core. Suburbanization hadn’t happened yet, the interstate system hadn’t been built, and trains/busses were the primary form of intercity travel.
However, once those things occurred, you had middle class flight, white flight, etc. to the suburbs plus increased car usage and plane usage, and the socioeconomic profile of many inner city neighborhoods where Greyhound had invested in stations slowly changed and in many cases deteriorated.
By the time the area around a Greyhound station became “poor, high crime neighborhoods”, Greyhound was no longer in a financial position to move, and the economic status of their customers had also changed so it would’ve been pointless to move anyways. Many middle class people would no longer use intercity bus service as they had before the mid-1970s, as it became most people’s “last resort” to get somewhere.
Need to be downtown for maximal access to local buses. They need to be cheap as margins are not high. Therefore in the lowest cost area, usually depresses and/or high crime areas.
Nobody wants a bus station in their backyard, and poor communities can’t fight as well as rich ones.
It’s not quite that direct
Greyhound bus stations are only profitable when they are set in the middle of extremely dense inner city neighborhoods where there are buttload of people who can’t afford vehicles but need such transportation
When you have 500 people in two square blocks instead of 10 people in the same area, you have a lot more chance of there being a whole lot of crime. In fact that’s 490 more chances of drug addicts, criminals, sex offenders, whatever. Also because of the extremely condensed space, there’s more people than jobs which means the pay is low. Which makes more crime. Which means people who have money don’t want to live there so they move out and only the people who are desperate move in because there’s nothing else they can afford. And around and around and around it goes
So it’s not that the bus moves into a high crime area. It’s that the buses work where there’s lots of people and crime also tends to happen where there’s a lot of people.
Only time I’ve been robbed was the Greyhound bus station in Houston. Right in front of the station too lol
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