Long Distance Coaches From Riga

Long distance coaches are rather developed and popular mode of passenger transportation in the Baltic States. Last year I wrote how coaches dominate the public transport market within Baltic States so now it’s time to look what are the possibilities for travel from Riga to destinations beyond borders of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. There also are several long distance coach routes not involving Riga but these are not taken into account here.

Altogether 131 unique cities and towns outside the Baltic States can be identified with direct service from Riga. As the map shows – all routes can be divided in two large groups based on their geography:

1) The closest destinations – Russia (excluding Moscow), Belarus and northern part of Poland. This group includes frequent services to the large cities as Warsaw, St Petersburg and Minsk and far less frequent services to regional destinations like Gomel and Baranavichy in Belarus or Velikiy Novgorod and Smolensk in Russia. Services in this group see competition from car travel and in lesser extent from air travel (limited number of destinations focused on feeding Riga hub) and trains (service being limited to St Petersburg, Minsk and few more stops on the way). Routes in this group have many stops in the Baltic States and further abroad and they are operated by various companies often strongly cooperating and, in some occasions, competing.  

2) Routes to more distant destinations in Ukraine, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Russia (Moscow) and other countries. All of them (except few in Ukraine) are operated by carrier Norma-A under Ecolines brand. These routes face strong competition from airlines (airBaltic and Ryanair) that outperform Ecolines by frequency and seat capacity, and of course – by travel time.

Nevertheless there are reasons why some costumers choose 31-hour bus ride instead of less than 3-hour flight to Düsseldorf. First of all - coaches serve many more cities and towns than air travel can offer. Almost all of West-heading coaches from Riga make a detour to pick more passengers at Vilnius and stop at all mayor towns all the way to Warsaw. In Germany and the Netherlands coaches stop at large number of medium-sized towns. So being closer to the origin and destination of passenger is a cornerstone in this service. This positively effects the overall travel costs as ground transport in Germany is monopolized and expensive.

Secondly, coach travel is generally cheaper than air travel for close departure bookings, yet directly comparison is hard as airlines use fare level system and extensive sales but Eurolines – flat fares. In the example of Düsseldorf, flat Eurolines fare of €110 is undercut by airBaltic for travel 7-8 weeks from today and by Ryanair – within a week from today. As Ryanair has recently restricted online bookings for travels from Latvia and Lithuania for departures within a week due to credit card fraud risk, choosing a coach is an alternative also in urgent cases.

And the last, but not the least reason is luggage allowance. While charging for checked-in luggage is a mayor revenue source for almost all airlines operating from Riga, Eurolines don’t charge for luggage at all and the luggage size regulations are less strict. This is a large travel cost saver for those passengers intending for a longer stay – guest workers and students for example.

Passengers loading luggage for their trip from Riga to Kiev at Riga coach station. Operated by Ukrlines under Ecolines brand. The €50 service is popular despite the more than 16-hour ride and need of Belorussian transit visa.  

Norma-A has publicly admitted that after the opening of German labor market their sales has strongly increased and some capacity will be added. But what are other development opportunities in the market? As top priority for Ecolines I see more complicated fare system that guaranties lower fare than air travel also for more distant departure dates and allows benefit from elements of yield management. If the number of departures is going to increase - the number of destinations per route should be decreased to reduce the travel times (similar to current route to Paris that skip all German destinations). The role of frequency seems to less important in this type of service, though I believe no destination should be served less than twice weekly anyway. If the market grows, different route structure of developed transfer opportunities and high route frequencies may be applied. From one side - long distance coach market is strongly linked to situation in air travel so increased airfares must increase the passenger number for bus travels, but from the other side - many of the potential passengers may choose not to travel at all because of the unacceptable travel time by coach or choose to make the journey by car to benefit from grater flexibility. 

Mix of Trains and Coaches for Riga Suburban Transport

Yesterday morning I took an early suburban train (7:45 a.m.) from Riga to Jelgava and found that train load was very light – just about 5% of seats was filled in my car. Actually this is not a surprise for of-peak (weekend) train. The operator use a strategy to keep train headways of around 40 minutes with makes the service quite attractive for the costumers. But how to keep the operation costs down and keep the short service intervals at the same time? Easy – use lower capacity coaches on the instead of the heavy trains.

Mix of trains and coaches on the same line gives good cash and time savings and go well together because:

1. Busses are used for off-peak traffic when passenger numbers are lower and spacious trains are used only when crowd of pax is expected. There will be no need for peak passengers to cross-subsideze off-peak passengers and ticket prices would go down for everyone.

2. Suburbs (at least around Riga) are situated along transit corridors where both – railways and highways are present.

3. Off-peak on rail means also off-peak on roads so coach travel times would be acceptable for passengers. The travel distances are not typically extensively long (<50 km) so the difference in real travel times because of operation speed can’t be big.

4. In most cases all passengers from one off-peak train can’t be fit in 50-seat coach so number of runs could actually be increased and headways cut so making the average waiting time shorter and give a time saving (and make the service more attractive).

A problem for introduction of mixed train-coach service is lack of coach piers in Riga central station and even worse - problems of approaching some intermediate train stops. This means that some stops will be located physically separate from train stops (near a highway) or even passed. It gives serious limitations for dynamic change of vehicles because passengers can not quickly move from railway to highway in many cases (e.g. rail to highway distance in Salaspils is 1.3 km) but - if the schedule is stable and known for everyone – it should not be big headache for passengers.

Coaches Lead the Baltic Inter-City Transit

Coaches are the most developed and popular mode of intercity public transport in Baltic States despite the lack of highways and expressways (especially in Latvia and Estonia). The recent public order change in Latvia show that coaches are pushing trains out of business. A number of trains were substituted with coaches in Riga – Liepaja, Ventspils, Renge, Gulbene routes - booth main and secondary city pairs. The trains have too big passenger capacity (or too less frequency), the intensive freight transit has notably slowed down passenger trains and reduced free rail capacity. Also the costumer service is outdated – no new train sets, no separate-level stations, no high platforms, no multimodal opportunities, no rain shelters at stations and so on. As the governments of the Baltic States allows train-coach competition (unlike France and Germany) coaches has logically proved to be the most economical choice in almost all examined Baltic city pairs. This analysis showed the power of coaches and I start to doubt if my earlier proposed Rail Baltica Domestic plan will ever be competitive with inter-city coaches. Diagram below shows the coach connections between twenty biggest cities in the Baltic States.

The busiest route is Riga – Jelgava with 77 one-way runs on the day analysed (March 26th). Latvia have more cities in Western par so Eastern part seems to be undeveloped, but in reality Eastern part have many smaller towns and more developed rail network. In Lithuania coach routes are dense and frequent between Vilnius, Kaunas, Siauliai, Panevezys, Alytus, Marijampole. Similar situation is in Estonia – the main city pars are well cowered. The only state where trains significantly influence coach network is Latvia: Riga to Daugavpils and Rezekne is served by trains trice and twice daily and the coach departures are not as frequent as it could be. The international routes involve Riga in almost all cases. Booth Rezekne and Daugavpils have just one-weekly coach service to Vilnius with is not showed on the map (runs on Saturtdays).

Possible Drop in Ticket Prices

The bar chart shows kilometer price on analysed routes (average by country on runs with pricing information available). The route length between cities was chosen by routing tool in balticmaps.eu GIS site and no additional entries in town centers adjacent to the main road and other route modifications are taken into account. The results are clear – Latvia have the cheapest domestic coach ticket prices while Lithuania the highest. I am not well informed about subsidy systems in Estonia and Lithuania but one thing is unclear – why the uncontrolled international services are cheaper then Lithuanian domestic services. Latvian domestic coach routes are government regulated and subsidased ant the ticket prices are kept low.

In a few months a new Eurolines brand – Simple Express – is to start Riga – Kaunas (with connection to Warsaw) and Riga - Tallinn routes at incredibly low ticket prices – €7 or €8  to Kaunas and €10.5 to Tallinn. Simple express service is cheaper than Latvian heavily subsidized domestic service and almost twice as cheaper than Lithuanian domestic service. The way Simple Express can provide so cheap fares is still unclear, but – if it is sustainable – this move will cut fares on international routes and maybe will make the governments to deregulate the domestic markets in order to benefit from real competition.