D.C. to New York for $10. Seriously.

Thrifty Travelers Discover a Gem in Chinatown Bus Lines

At 2:23 a.m., American University freshman Gene Fielden settles into a chair in the dank basement bus depot at 513 H St NW. He thinks he has found a way to kill time when the pow-pow-pow of a television movie erupts from a small set in the corner.

Then the dialogue starts -- in Chinese.

"Easy listening, huh?" he yells, pointing to the speaker above his head.

Greyhound this is not.

But for Fielden, and for many others who have found their way to Washington-New York Express Tours' bus stop in Chinatown, or to its competitor Dragon Expressway & Travel Inc. a block away, this late-night trip isn't about tidy terminals, frequent departures or reclining seats. It's about price. To be exact, $10 for a one-way ticket from Washington to New York. Round trip? $15.

Largely under the radar, a new transportation link has taken hold between cities up and down the East Coast: Chinatown-to-Chinatown buses, which originally targeted immigrant Chinese restaurant workers. Dragon and Washington-New York Express Tours, joined by a handful of other tiny lines, are now waging an elbows-out battle for dominance in the niche market. At least four motor-coach companies run routes to New York's Chinatown -- from the District as well as from Boston, Philadelphia, Richmond and Baltimore -- in a competition that, in Manhattan at least, has even broken into violence over parking spaces and potential passengers.

"We are trying to eliminate the other company," said Tom Wong, 33, a manager and bus driver for Washington-New York Express Tours. "That's our only goal. We want to destroy each other."

Thrifty Washington travelers, many of them college students, have become the beneficiaries of the fierce price war. Neither bus line operating in the District bothers with mass marketing. Dragon has developed a bare-bones Web site; Washington-New York Express Tours says it plans one. A few advertisements run in New York's Chinese-language newspapers, but promotion, in general, consists of friends telling friends about a cheap ride.

Washington-New York Express Tours, whose parent company, New Century Travel Inc., has its roots in Philadelphia, and Dragon, based in New York, set up shop in Washington less than a year ago. Both registered with the Transportation Department, opened storefronts in identical basement apartments one block from each other, and then taped up a few handwritten bus schedules around the District. The operations were modest. Buses -- some new, most old, some owned, most leased -- departed at 2 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. daily.

The service sought out passengers like Chung Wen. The 23-year-old restaurant worker, who moved to Maryland from Shanghai three years ago, takes the $10 bus to visit his brother in New York on days off. The 2 a.m. bus leaves him just enough time to race home from work, pack a bag and make it to Dragon's bus terminal at 610 I St. NW. "It works with my schedule," he said in Chinese.

The price war began in May, slashing an average round-trip fare of $40 to $15. The two companies now undercut every alternative along the hyper-competitive Northeast corridor: the airline shuttles (by at least $150 for a round trip), Amtrak (by about $140) and Greyhound (by about $45). It is even cheaper than the gas and tolls it would take to drive yourself (by about $15).

Greyhound does not seem worried about the Chinese bus lines. In fact, it has never heard of them. The Dallas-based bus company maintains 26 daily departures from Washington to New York alone and said 440,000 passengers used the route in the past year. "You are getting frequency and a much better service pattern on Greyhound," said Kim Plaskett, a company spokeswoman. "But we welcome competition."