Virginia’s answer to Greyhound shows rural areas are worth serving

Over the course of the past 50 years Greyhound alone has shed 86.9% of its bus operators. In 2013, with most of Virginia’s remaining motorcoach service limited to Interstate 95 and the I-64 corridor between Richmond and Hampton Roads, the Department of Rail and Public Transportation issued a study on how service could be restored to areas outside the Urban Crescent.

Four years later, DRPT launched such service under the banner of the Virginia Breeze. Funded by the Federal Transit Administration’s Intercity Bus Program, DRPT contracts Dillon’s Bus Service — a Maryland-based subsidiary of Coach USA — to provide vehicles, drivers, maintenance and ticketing systems. Besides Colorado’s Bustang service, subsidized intercity buses exist nowhere else in America.