Interurban and rural bus transportation

The opening looks obvious. Greyhound Canada shut every remaining route in May 2021 [B], Ontario deregulated intercity bus the same year, and only 63 establishments are left in the whole country [A]. A coach, a carrier licence and a ticketing site are enough to run a scheduled corridor. The cut is what the only continental network earned. When FirstGroup sold Greyhound Lines in October 2021 it disclosed $422.6M of revenue and $1.8M of adjusted operating profit for the prior year, took $172M in cash, and had to keep $320M of pension, self-insurance and lease liabilities to get the deal done [A]; the buyer's own release put the enterprise value at about $46M plus $32M deferred [A]. A pandemic year flatters nothing, but Greyhound had been retreating from Canada since 2018. The mechanism is the passenger: the intercity bus rider is the traveller without a car, choosing on price against a rideshare post, a discounted rail fare or not travelling. Fares cannot rise to cover a half-empty coach, and rural segments — the ones left unserved — are half-empty by construction; British Columbia and others now subsidise those directly. The dense corridors that do cover their cost are where the returning scale operator and the established regionals already run. An entrant gets the routes nobody wants at fares nobody can raise. Unlike School Bus Contracting (4854), there is no tender here guaranteeing the revenue. Transit scheduling software is screened separately.