>A huge error in your guess - ordinarily, Greyhound-Pioneer have two buses a
>day (one day, one overnight) McCafferty's have one bus (overnight) and
>Firefly have one service (also overnight) - total four buses a day. During
>school holiday periods, they do run extra buses, but to the same schedules
>as at the moment.
>
If the major bus companies only run 4 buses, what hope do we really have for
a 20 carriage Overland vs. the current 3????? After all, a rail service will
be more closely competing for coach passengers and car drivers than with
airlines.
>>> This means that on average, there could potentially be a bus
>>> leaving almost every hour.
>
It was a poorly explained mathematical assumption. I am under no more belief
that if there were 20 buses a day that they would leave every hour on the
hour than you are, no more than suburban trains (Upfield line excepted.....)
would run equally frequently despite the strong peaks in customer demand
around 8am and 5pm. Credit me with some intelligence. I find it hard enough
to believe that people want to travel to Adelaide, let alone do it at 3am in
the morning. 8^)
>I can't be bothered replying to any more of the fallacious arguments
>espoused by somebody who obviously knows NOTHING about the coach industry -
>as somebody who used to work for Deluxe, Bus Australia and Greyhound, and
>then for a travel agency with a heavy emphasis on coach travel, I do know a
>little bit about the industry - unfortunately Peter, and don't take this
>personally, you do not.
>
Chill out, I hate the thought of travelling on a coach let alone working for
the industry. Bully for you that you have worked for most of the major coach
companies. So shoot me for not having worked for one. My post was not trying
to explain coach operational practices, it was making the point that even
weighing all the assumptions heavily in favour of bus transport (however
unrealistically in terms of people travelling and buses to carry them),
trains cannot possibly hope to generate the traffic between Mel-Adl to even
think seriously about running several services a day. And as you have
not-so-kindly pointed out, neither do the bus companies the railways are
competing for passengers against.