Oh well, goodbye - Arf!

Greyhound has stopped bus service to nearly 1,000 smaller towns this year, the Christian Science Monitor tells us.

Service stopped at 81 locales last week alone, and hundreds more are expected to be dropped as the Dallas-based carrier and its subsidiaries roll out new routes across the country into 2006. ...

Left in a puff of exhaust are the small towns that helped define the image of the Greyhound as a low-rent hitch that appealed to Americans' sense of adventure and earned it broad cultural recognition in everything from country songs to movies like "Midnight Cowboy."

To be fair, the change is understandable: Ridership is off by nearly 70% from the 1970 peak and the company lost $22 million in the first quarter of 2005. And it found from surveys of its passengers that they were becoming more urban, less rural, less interested in long-distance routes (over 450 miles), and more interested in speed.

So I can understand both what Greyhound is doing - choosing to focus on more direct routes between urban centers - and why it's doing it. Still, I can't help but be saddened by what it represents: a reflection on how we're changing, with smaller towns becoming even more isolated, more cut off from the wider world around them, and - partly as cause, partly as result - shrinking both in population and our attention. You don't have to idealize or romanticize "small town America" to realize that a culture loses something when the choices of for lack of a better term lifestyle are reduced and when "speed" and "efficiency" become not even the primary but increasingly the only standards of measurement. And even if you celebrate the energy and diversity of cities you can be aware of what the increasing division between urban and rural can mean for our politics.

Personally, I prefer the train to the bus for long-distance travel, but I have ridden Greyhound: I did two cross-country round trips and another round trip between the east coast and Denver. It was while thinking of those that I noticed that in those surveys Greyhound did, passengers' biggest complaint was "lengthy, meandering routes."

Damn, I always thought that was the best part of the trip.