By Raw Fisherfrom Marc Fisher's Blog
Tuesday, April 15, 2008; B03

I went from the District to Manhattan the other day, and my trip involved two trains and a bus. Can you rank the three pieces of my journey by how much they cost?

· Metro from Northwest Washington to Metro Center.

· Bus from downtown Washington to midtown Manhattan.

· Subway from 33rd Street to 57th Street in New York.

Answer: The three elements of the trip cost $1.35, $1.50 and $2 -- in the order I listed the modes of transportation above.

I didn't believe it till the bus pulled away from the curb, but I really got a 225-mile trip for $1.50.

Consider me a convert.

Bolt Bus is an effort by the folks at Greyhound to come to terms with the newly competitive nature of the East Coast intercity bus business. Ever since the various Chinatown bus services arrived on the scene a few years ago, the Big Dog has been left to chase his own tail. Everything the hound did, the Chinatown buses (they started out as a service run by Chinese immigrants for their compatriots in New York's Chinatown) did better: The upstarts were cheaper, faster, more flexible and, most important for many Washington passengers, didn't require you to head over to Greyhound's sleazy Northeast station.

The Big Dog tried to fight back by noting that some of the upstarts had been the subject of government complaints about their safety. But riders like me didn't care. We preferred to take our chances on the cheap trip, even if some drivers seemed more interested in smoking, eating and chatting while they operated the bus.

Now Greyhound is fighting back in a much more alluring way, with a bus service that's cheaper, faster and more convenient than either the Chinatown services or its own more expensive Greyhound classic buses.

The Bolt is a spanking-new orange-and-black coach -- it has the most intense new car smell I've ever sniffed -- that pulls up to the southeast corner of 11th and G streets NW 12 minutes early. (It will pull out two minutes early, another impressive touch.) The driver, dressed in a neat, form-fitting Bolt Bus black sweater and uni, glances at the boarding pass you've printed at home, and you're on your way. There were a grand total of six people on my midday trip to New York, but the service is just a couple of weeks old, so that's not necessarily a sign of lack of customer interest.

On my trip, three of the six passengers chose Bolt because it offers wireless service all along the route. (A couple of folks complained that reception was slow. Hey, for a buck, hold the whining.) All of us chose Bolt because of the price. One woman, a student at the University of Maryland, said she picked Bolt because "I heard it's owned by Peter Pan/Greyhound, so it's reputable-ish."

Only two of us got the $1 fare (there's a 50-cent booking fee online, which is the main way to buy Bolt seats). The others paid $5 or $7, except for the one walk-on, who paid $20, which is still less than Greyhound and less than a third the cost of a regional Amtrak train around the same time of day. Bolt uses a Southwest Airlines-style system in which a few seats on each trip are sold at ludicrously cheap levels and the prices bump up a notch or two as the time before the trip diminishes.

The Bolt bus had three flat-screen TVs on board, but luckily they were not in operation. Our driver told us that while "we usually say to please keep conversation to a minimum so you don't disturb your neighbors, today you can do whatever you want" because there were so few of us.

We made it to Manhattan's West Side in three hours and 52 minutes -- eight minutes longer than an Amtrak local train and 25 minutes shorter than Greyhound's D.C.-N.Y.C. run. Best of all, Bolt, unlike some of its competitors, makes no potty stop -- just a nonstop Bolt to the big city.

Bolt won't be alone in the buck-a-trip biz for long. On May 30, Scottish-owned Megabus is jumping into the fray with 11 departures daily from the District to Manhattan, leaving from Union Station, a new wrinkle in the downtown street corner vs. Greyhound bus station competition. Megabus hasn't announced its full range of fares, but it has committed to $1 fares for some passengers.

Given the price of gas and tolls, not to mention insurance and taxes, these companies can't offer these bargain-basement fares for long, so grab them now. You can always go back to the seething, cursing, wild-driving, smoking Chinatown drivers; those trips get you there for next to nothing, but they feel as cheap as they are.