Last Bus Home: Are China’s Coach Services Doomed?

Tan Yunfei (谭云飞)

With an aging ridership and canceled routes, China’s intercity buses struggle to survive

“Qidong! Qidong! Going to Qidong? All aboard! We’re leaving…” a female attendant hails me from a bus stop as I step off the No. 115 intracity bus at Huaxin Coach Station in Hengyang, Hunan province. It awakens in me a familiar feeling, both sad and happy: I’ll be home soon, though it’s a bumpy ride of over 110 kilometers or three hours ahead to my home village in Buyunqiao town, Qidong county, usually on a standing-room only coach where people jump on and off along the way.

This 29-seat bus, one of several that cumulatively run 30 times a day from Hengyang to the city’s Qidong county, has been my most reliable means of traveling home over the last two decades. From the time I started college in downtown Hengyang, then found work in Shenzhen and Beijing, and until the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, I made this trip at least once or twice a year. I often traveled during the National Day and Lunar New Year holidays, along with other students and workers going home.

Huaxin Coach Station opened in 2003, and reportedly can run 800 bus shifts with capacity to carry 11,000 passengers daily. It connects downtown Hengyang with the towns and villages in Hengyang, Qidong, and Hengnan counties in the southwest, whose combined population totaled over 2 million by the end of 2021. During the National Day holiday from October 1 to October 7 in 2016, over 21,000 passengers took bus es here, many of them first arriving by train or plane in Hengyang from other cities or provinces. On October 1 that year, deterred by the seemingly endless lines to board the bus, many people heading to neighboring towns, including me and a similarly hopeless family of three, carpooled using ride-hailing apps like DiDi instead.

By comparison, on the morning of Sunday, April 9, 2023, it’s a totally different scene. Instead of crowds of homebound travelers, I count less than two dozen passengers walking up to pay fares during the two hours I spend there. They are mainly students, seniors, or families with kids. When the bus leaves the station at noon for downtown Qidong, around 60 kilometers away, I’m the only passenger on board except the driver and attendant, who say the previous bus left 20 minutes ago with the driver alone.

The days when a “sea of people” queued in and out of the station for a seat or standing space on the bus have gone, the ticket-seller, whose surname is Li, complains. “We now sell only 300 to 400 tickets a day. Tickets start at 5 yuan, and even the most expensive ticket [for the farthest distance] is 32 yuan…It will only get worse and worse.”

Empty coaches, declining demand

In fact, this bus station and the 15-floor office building above it have been on shaky financial ground for years. Its owner, the Hengyang Automobile Transportation Group (HATG), went bankrupt last January, leaving an uncertain future for its more than 3,900 employees, 1,300 buses, and 49 bus terminals in surrounding towns and districts, according to numbers shown on its website (which stopped updating in July 2021).

While demand for bus services has been on a general decline, many locals, especially the rural elderly, still need them to travel into towns and cities to buy food, visit hospitals, and access other services.

I’m the only passenger on board except the driver and attendant, who say the previous bus left 20 minutes ago with the driver alone.

Around the country, the bus transport industry, including both intercity and intracity buses, has been struggling: The number of passengers has decreased, bus shifts have been cut, routes have been canceled, and terminals have closed. In 2021, 42 passenger transport terminals were shut down in Guangdong province alone, including the 43-year-old Shajing station in Shenzhen, which suffered plummeting number of passengers and “severe deficit” due to the impact of high-speed trains, car hailing services, and the pandemic, as the station reported.

This March, Hankou North Passenger Transportation Center, the largest passenger transport terminal in Wuhan, closed less than three years after its opening. Haikou East Station in the capital of Hainan, China’s southernmost province, shut down this April after three decades of operation.

From 2012 to 2022, the mileage of railway in China increased from 98,000 to 155,000 kilometers, including 42,000 kilometers of high-speed rail covering the majority of China’s 293 prefecture-level cities. Meanwhile, the volume of highway passenger transport peaked in 2012 at 35.57 billion trips, and fell to 5 billion in 2021 after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Ministry of Transport.

Routes canceled, stations bankrupt

The bus industry is doomed, “as people now have more options for transport,” asserts Fang Jie, who has been a ticket-seller at Qidong Coach Station for over 20 years. Fang, who didn’t want to give out her real name, explains that more and more people have their own cars. They are also willing to pay double or even triple price to take high-speed trains, for the comfort and to cut down their travel time by a third or even half compared with coaches.

Established in 1989 by the HATG’s Qidong branch, Qidong Coach Station, serving a county of more than 760,000 people in western Hengyang, has decayed in many ways. Within four years after the launch of Qidong’s new railway station with high-speed train services in 2013, its long-distance coach routes to cities outside of Hunan were canceled. Neighboring Guangdong province was the only exception, and the formerly dozen coaches per day to various parts of Guangdong were cut to only one every two days. The parking lot originally reserved for inter-provincial buses is now occupied by an out-of-use Covid testing kiosk, several private cars, and a retired coach that has languished there for at least two years.

Similarly, the number of buses from Qidong to Hengyang city dropped from around 40 per day (one shift every 20 minutes) to only eight (one per hour). Buses to the neighboring Qiyang county, which also got high-speed trains in 2013, fell from eight to two per day.

It’s a struggle to even find the coach station now, as its ticket hall is sandwiched between a large drug store and a nightclub refurbished from the station’s former waiting lounge. Last year, the HATG began to delay payment of employee salaries, and Fang has not seen a penny for half a year. Li, the ticket-seller at Hengyang’s Huaxin Station, is still getting her salary, but with a one-month delay. The company has not been making regular social insurance payments for its employees for years.

Li partially blames the Group’s fall to its privatization in 2000, which led to managers “exploiting the common workers and the former state assets for their own benefits due to the lack of [state] supervision.” The two disappointed women, both in their 40s, hope that the company can go through bankruptcy procedures as soon as possible so that they will be made redundant with compensation for their over 20 years of service here, and then find new employment.

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