'Chinatown Buses': What You Need to Know

The Washington Deluxe line "follows all the same rules the big guys follow," said Betty, a Washington Deluxe owner who for "safety reasons" asked that only her first name be used. "I work six days a week making sure we comply with every rule," she said. The questions being raised about curbside operators, she said, are prompted "by big guys wanting to put little guys out of business."

At Todays Bus, manager Ming Yu said, "I'm not in a position to state an opinion regarding the operation." She referred a reporter to the owner, who did not respond to two messages.

Company Snapshots

The emergence of dozens of curbside operators hasn't changed the fact that overall, bus travel is safer than taking to the highways by car. (Buses have about half the fatality rate of cars.) But in an East Coast inspection sweep last year of 400 buses owned by all types of bus companies, officials found more than 500 safety violations, some so serious that 56 buses and 13 drivers were ordered off the road.

What can a traveler do to find even bare details about a bus line to which they intend to entrust their lives?

You can get a "company snapshot" at the FMCSA Web site, but you need to know the legal name of the bus line, which often bears no resemblance to the name under which it operates.

Say, for instance, you were thinking of taking Dragon Coach from Washington to New York. At http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/ you'll find the business with a Baltimore address and phone number.

But the person who answers at that number says it's an accounting office, and he doesn't know Dragon Coach.

Back at FMCSA's Web site, check at the bottom of the snapshot, click on "Licensing and Insurance," and you'll find Dragon Coach has no operating authority and no insurance on file. More checks show that Dragon Coach, operated by Tomorrow Travel and Tour, was ordered out of service last year.

You'd have to turn to independent sources to discover that after being ordered out of service, Dragon Coach, also called Dragon Deluxe, changed its corporate name to Dragon Expressway & Travel Inc. and kept operating. That company's operating authority is "inactive."

To dig further, you'd have to know -- as FMCSA spokesman Grossman told The Post -- that Dragon Coach is now operating under the legal name Sago Bus Group Inc.

Sago does have authority to operate, and according to FMCSA's "company snapshot" has two buses, two drivers and no crashes. But the company was rated "conditional" in April, -- meaning that it must fix problems before winning a "satisfactory" rating.

Sago shows a Pittsburgh address and phone. A man who would not give his name answered that phone number and said he didn't know of Sago.

Told that Sago lists his office as its own on federal registration records, the man then said that he is Sago's manager. But any questions about Sago must be addressed to the owner, he told a reporter, and he gave a New York phone number. Asked for the owner's name, he said, "I cannot tell you that."

The person who answered the New York number also refused to give the owner's name, but promised to leave him a message. That and two other phone messages were not answered.

Outsourcing Buses

FMCSA plans to again post safety statistics on registered bus lines at its Web site, Grossman said, but is awaiting the outcome of audits by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Government Accountability Office.

By the way, how can Sago, with two buses and two drivers, operate multiple daily routes among seven cities? As congressional testimony revealed earlier this year, many curbside operators subcontract with other coach companies for at least some of their buses and drivers. If you show up at a stop and ask the driver for the name of the operating company that owns his bus and employs him, he might or might not be able to tell you. Or you can call the company and ask for its corporate name and the name of any subcontractors it uses.

States provide varying degrees of oversight on bus companies registered in their jurisdiction, but primary responsibility lies with FMCSA. Schumer's spokesman said about 700 FMCSA inspectors are trying to police about 3,800 bus companies nationwide. The agency's budget hasn't increased for years, despite the mushrooming of companies -- up over 65 percent in the last year and a half.

Schumer has urged that a better-funded FMCSA beef up enforcement, and that companies be required to post their last inspection ratings on each bus.

Until that happens, you can try looking up the safety stats on your own. If bus lines won't tell you their corporate name and no current information is available at FMCSA, maybe what you're seeing is a red flag.