City Of Philadelphia Homeless Death Review: Fill & Download for Free

Because they are dinosaurs. (Not just Greyhound, but all of them.) They hit a series of extinction-level events some thirty to fifty years ago, and the few (including Greyhound) that weren’t killed off were left for dead.And today, the motorcoach industry is so overripe for disruption as a result, that it can't even be considered a 'mature industry' when you think about it.They’re like daily newspapers and hotel franchising companies: they’re what I’d call ‘post-mature’ industries. Everything about them, and their operating model, is so past its prime, so no-longer-workable, and has accumulated layer upon layer of brokenness along the way, that, if — in this case — you wanted to own a nationwide motorcoach carrier, you’d be better off starting one from scratch and getting it right this time around than you would be if you could buy out Greyhound.One way or another, you’d be starting over from scratch, anyway. With a new carrier, you’d be limited to your investment costs. With Greyhound, you’d have to buy it at the current owners’ valuation, then completely gut it — wiping out the value of it in the process — and rebuild it from scratch, effectively paying for it twice (at least), but with a lot of uncertainty as to what value you’d be able to place on the end result.We looked at a hypothetical buyout of Choice Hotels three years ago, and arrived at the same conclusion. No matter how you ran the numbers, first you’d have to buy enough of the stock to get control of the company and its system. Then in order to fix its problems, you’d have to kick more than half of its franchised hotels out of the system — but what would the company then be worth, once you do? And afterward, can you get that many new hotels built, and franchisees signed, to replace them? And meanwhile, over the several years that it would take to do that, where are Choice’s now-existing customers going to go? And will you be able to get them to come back afterward? You’d be better off to just start a new hotel chain, from scratch.It’s like the municipal sanitary sewer system in Tegucigalpa, Honduras after Hurricane Mitch: engineers who went over it as part of an aid program after the hurricane concluded that it was in such bad shape to begin with, even before the storm, that the only way to proceed would be to just junk the entire system and start over.What happened to Greyhound and these other dinosaurs, you ask?The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and associated legislation.I hate to say it, because I don't like assuming the presence of racism in events or occurrences where it is possible that an undesirable event or occurrence may be due to some other cause (some people do do that, and it annoys me), but that seems to be one of three watershed events that would account for it.Whether or not in response, specifically, the simple fact at the time was that the industry had a lot of Southern good-old-boys running it, and it was also at this time that bus travel went from being regarded as a respectable, economical personal travel alternative, to a means of 'hauling' the underclass -- both black and white.The management of many of the carriers anticipated white flight. You won’t be able to get nice folks to choose to take the bus anymore, someone apparently figured, so don’t even try. You had the kind of people running the carriers who assumed that decent white people wouldn’t want to ride on a bus on which the seating wasn’t segregated, and who didn’t know how to distinguish between good black folks and ‘undesirable’ blacks.So, they resigned themselves to the idea that their function in the future would be transportation for the underclass, of whatever race. Instead of promoting family travel and an economical way to get there for college students, single ladies, and retirees, and keeping up their rolling stock and facilities at a level conducive to that kind of customer base as they had always done before; they just planned on taking whoever they could get as passengers, and ‘hauling’ them . . .Even in more recent years, people who take the bus are regarded as losers in life, and no one takes the bus if they have any other way to get there.And when management views its own customer base that way, when you see your own customers as a bunch of animals who deserve no better, bad things happen.They let their terminals run down accordingly. Even when they build a brand new one (often with some public investment, in many places nowadays), they let it start running completely to crap as soon as it opens.The Richmond, Va., terminal, when it was built around 1998, was absolutely impressive. It was clean, there was a nice restaurant with a good selection, and the food was good and was fairly priced. Its one drawback was that it’s comparatively isolated: it’s not within walking distance of anything except the ballpark across the Boulevard from it — as far as location goes, someone was out to get it out of downtown, that’s what they achieved, and they let it go at that.(Indeed, most of the people who travel through there are transferring passengers. If you take a Greyhound to the Northeast from anywhere in the southeastern quadrant of the United States — and maybe some points west of Texas — you’re going to change buses in Richmond; and board one that will take you straight to Washington, D. C., if that’s where you’re going. Or straight to Baltimore. Or straight to Philadelphia. Or straight to New York, with a rest stop in Baltimore, or straight to Boston, etc. . . . And traveling from any of those Northeastern cities, you go straight to Richmond, and your connection there, to get to anywhere in the Southeast.)Still, Greyhound could come back with terminals like this — if they’d only keep them up.But within two years, the Richmond terminal was filthy, it was as nasty as any bus terminal anywhere, the food was ‘captive audience’ quality at ‘captive audience’ pricing, with not nearly as much to pick from. The one time in my life I got into trouble and tossed into jail for a couple of days, it was cleaner, nicer and while the portions were small, the food wasn’t any worse. And you had undesirables hanging out — winos, panhandlers, homeless people — despite the Richmond terminal’s isolated location within the city: just the kind of people that people avoid taking the bus to avoid being around; but these are people who are taken for granted, even by Greyhound, as the sort of people who hang around bus terminals. Where do they bring these people in from? I know most of them can’t afford a Greyhound ticket. They couldn’t have walked there from anywhere that was within walking distance (the ballpark is across the Boulevard, there’s a convenience store a quarter mile away, and the rest is industrial sites — it’s relatively isolated for an urban bus terminal), you’d have to have something waiting there for you in order to have it be worth the hike. Does the city round them up and dump them there? Walk out the front doors, and there is a line of taxis whose drivers solicit aggressively. Well . . . if you don’t have a ride coming, you have to get away from that voodoo hellhole somehow.What’s even more pathetic than public investment in privately-owned bus terminals (often done with good intention, to encourage public transportation; but sometimes to get them moved to a place where they’d be less of a nuisance, as was probably the case in Richmond)? How about when the city wants to run you out of town, as the city of Riverside, California decided to do with Greyhound? It actually happened: they considered bus riders a potential nuisance. (Frankly, it’s the same as with cheap motels: you don’t have problems on the coaches themselves as frequently as you might wonder; high-profile incidents involving crazies who should be more easily spotted at the terminal notwithstanding. It’s usually the local people who are permitted to hang out at the terminal.) But let’s face it — when the host of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno refers to your bus company as “a bad neighborhood on wheels”, your reputation as a carrier is probably less than stellar.They let their coaches deteriorate — for as long as they owned them. Nowadays, they no longer own them, they lease them, because that’s how ‘disposable’ they’ve become. But when they did own them, they had no shame around how junky they’d let them get and still run them. When I was a teenager back in the seventies, a driver admitted to me that “they keep them and run them until they’ve worn them out ten times” . . . And this was during the good days of Carolina Trailways, and Seashore . . .The industry became ripe for divestment. The goal became, and has been ever since, don’t have any more money invested in this than you have to, and have it continue to run. It’ll run forever and give you a halfway decent income if you keep your costs down, but you don’t want any capital tied up in it.Everywhere they ever had any capital tied up in it, they’ve worked at getting that money out.Two events would occur in the late '70's and early '80's to make large scale divestment, without completely liquidating the company and giving up the income from it altogether, doable. Both were well-intended and an opportunity, but they just did not work well together in the hands of stockholders and management looking for ways to get their capital out and reduce their investment in it.Deregulation.Regulation was getting to be a bit much by the late seventies: if you owned a coach line, the Interstate Commerce Commission had to approve your routes, stops, schedules and fares at the Federal level. Abuse certainly occurred. ICC operating authority, once obtained, was viewed as property: authority to operate on a certain route could be sold between private parties or companies. Some people even acquired operating authority on certain routes, even though they owned no coaches (of course, claiming they’d get some, although they had no intention of actually doing so), and leased it to a bus company (well . . . that’s how they went about getting the coaches). And because you are a common carrier if you own scheduled bus lines, and your license to operate was given to you as a result by a governmental finding — that you asked for — that the service you had in mind to offer is essential to the ‘public convenience and necessity’, it was hard to talk the ICC into letting you discontinue an unprofitable run.For Greyhound and the other established carriers, this kept stability in place — their routes were protected from competition, and the fares that they were permitted to charge assured that most of them would be very profitable — but it also locked in some very bad market responsiveness. They saw a lot of opportunity to be had for themselves if the regulations went away, and they could be free to eat a few competitors’ lunch, oblivious to the idea that new competitors might spring out of the woodwork and want to do the same to them. (Or even swoop down from the sky and do it, as the newly-deregulated, low-cost start-up airlines would do to the bus carriers.) And of course, they could cut some runs: if you weren't going to have but eight people on board for most of the trip, why tie up a 50-passenger coach that, purchased new, cost today’s equivalent of $500,000?They got their wish. Unfortunately, right at the same time, so did the airlines. Routes, stops, schedules and fares would thenceforth be regulated, if at all, at the state level. Once airlines started expanding, and especially as new low-cost carriers all but started popping up out of the ground, you could fly for not much more money than you could take a bus.This caused some disruption and uncertainty, while it lasted. For years, Greyhound had it too good for too long, and didn't mind sharing: the union-represented drivers were paid very well, and you had a professional class of drivers. Now, the unprofitable runs were gone, but so were the high profit margins on the more profitable runs.In late 1983, Greyhound -- in response to the lower margins it had to accept with the new competition from the airlines -- asked the drivers to take a small cut. (From $27 per hour to $25. In 1983 dollars. I know lots of people who wish they could make $25 per hour today.) The union wouldn't go along. They went on strike when the contract ran out, and the strike didn't succeed: Greyhound started cutting runs, and hiring non-union drivers, and ultimately broke the union.The emergence of new financing models.Equipment leasing: Back in the day, carriers had to buy and own their coaches. Equipment leasing, as an ownership model, began to occur in the late seventies.If you owned a bus line and wanted to put a few new coaches on the road, then for not much more than it would take to make the payments if you financed them, you could have the coaches painted in your livery, and you would not have to worry about selling them off when the lease term ran out. When you wore them out or the maintenance and repair costs on them started getting too high, you could just turn them back in and get new ones. Henceforth, Greyhound wouldn't own its coaches: insurance companies and doctors and lawyers with loose money in search of a passive investment would own them, and Greyhound would just pay the rent and operate them on its lines.If you own a bus line, the deal has its advantages. You didn't have to run ten-year-old coaches on your more marginal runs. Since newer coaches are more reliable, not nearly as badly worn, and aren’t so frequently in need of repair, you could eliminate a lot of jobs for mechanics who you’d otherwise need to coax another two years out of a fifteen-year-old diesel engine. And if you wanted to expand and your company had a good track record, the upfront cost of acquiring new coaches was much lower.But there's a flipside: you have to pay the lease on the coaches. You have to make the payments every month, no matter how few or how many people ride the bus. This made the breakeven point for many runs much, much higher, and further disincentivized continuing the runs that were more marginal.Leveraged buyouts: This caused Carolina Trailways and Seashore Trailways, the two Trailways carriers that dominated where I grew up, and for which I used to work back in the day, to die a miserable, painful death that was sickening to watch (When you hit the link, scroll down to read the history: the guy who built this website — a blog that was written in HTML back in the days before WordPress — and researched and wrote all the material on it doesn’t organize it very well).I worked for them at a time when their corporate owners, North American Philips, seemed to be committed to some serious reinvestment. Carolina built a nice new terminal in Raleigh to replace the ugly, old, badly designed art-deco barn next to Raleigh’s City Hall: the city wanted to knock the old terminal down and expand the City Hall. Seashore replaced their old terminal in Jacksonville, N. C. — located on a rowdy stretch of what was at the time the city’s infamous Court Street — with a nice facility that had been acquired by the local electric co-op and adapted for use as a bus terminal, complete with overpriced restaurant. They invested in some new MCI coaches, and Seashore acquired its Trailways affiliation.But in the end, it turned out that North American Philips was just shining it up in hopes of finding a buyer.It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d found a buyer that wanted to run a bus company, but the people that ended up with the two companies promptly recovered their investment and then some by stripping and selling off everything of value, then holding the combined company (they merged the two of them) together with shoestring and baling wire until they were able to get Greyhound to buy it from them.Greyhound itself was acquired by a former Continental Trailways executive, in a deal so badly overleveraged that, even if he had been able to fill every seat on every coach, every run, he still would have not been able to pay the debt on it. He had made the deal to buy it hoping to quickly take it public in an IPO. What he hadn’t considered adequately in advance of making his move is, hey, Greyhound is leasing its coaches instead of buying them nowadays, so all of its assets are gone except for some terminals in questionable downtown locations that are hard to put a value on and may take you some time to sell at a decent price. No one is going to touch this stock with a ten-foot pole at a price that will bring you enough money to get you out of the hole you’ve dug yourself into.Needless to say, this gentleman had to eventually get his debt restructured — and did such a good job of refinancing that he was able to acquire his former company Continental Trailways in a leveraged buyout, as well, and merge the two. The combined company was itself overleveraged (albeit by only 200% instead of 300% as Greyhound was prior to the Continental acquisition), had problems with the drivers unions, and ended up in bankruptcy a few years later.This killed Trailways as a brand, or at least left it to a fate worse than death. Continental Trailways — officially, “Trailways, Inc.” — was the single largest member of the Trailways consortium, larger than all the other Trailways members combined. When Continental was merged into Greyhound, nothing was left of Trailways as a carrier except for some regional member carriers scattered around the country. These surviving member carriers changed the bylaws of the National Trailways Bus System to insure that never again would a Trailways carrier become that dominant, and that ‘too big to fail’ and be able to do that much damage if they went out of business, left the Trailways system, or were acquired — but in doing so, they made entry into the Trailways system so onerous for new carriers that it isn’t worth doing. They effectively insured that Trailways as a brand would survive only in fragmented, disconnected pieces, and can never again be the nationwide carrier that it once was.Trailways is now pretty much a network of charter carriers: less than a dozen of its current 50–60 member carriers have scheduled runs anymore (New York Trailways/Adirondack Trailways in New York state, and Burlington Trailways in the upper Midwest, are the biggest ones: Susquehanna Trailways, which operates along the I-80 corridor between State College, Pa. and Port Authority, is the only other one of any size.). Nearly all the rest that have scheduled service at all are local feeder lines for Greyhound.After a few more corporate owners (one of which took it into bankruptcy again), Greyhound is now owned by a British company that seems intent on restoring some respectability to it: they’ve upgraded the coaches as they replace them, and now have leather seats and free wi-fi. And they’re innovating a bit: they are now partnered with Peter Pan on BoltBus, which keeps overhead low by offering only reserved, curbside service, and a yield-managed pricing model (book it online at just the right time, and you can get your ticket for a dollar).Deregulation, low margins, and debt incurred through leveraged buyouts, has kept Greyhound cash-strapped through most of the last 30–40 years, and there has been very little reinvestment in that time. Upgrading the coaches is easy, if you’re leasing the coaches: all you have to do is rewrite the specs, and they calculate that into the lease payments. The terminals and stations are still . . . bus terminals. Port Authority in New York City, for example, was back in the day considered a typical, nasty, big city terminal that no one liked. Now, it’s about average — even though its condition hasn’t improved that much over the years, and even though it still has some problems. If anything, it has more to offer than most.Greyhound’s problem nowadays is that it doesn’t seem to want to have any money invested in anything. They continue selling off existing, dedicated bus terminals that they own, and placing their company owned (or leased) facilities in smaller locations (e.g., Raleigh), and using overburdened agency stops that draw complaints (e.g., Virginia Beach).Availability of their coaches is spread thin: the last time I took a Greyhound, it broke down in Durham (N. C.), the Durham ticket agent put us all in taxis to the Greyhound terminal in Raleigh to make our connection — which turned out to be another broken-down bus. They had to send another bus up from Fayetteville to replace that one and take us to New Bern after a six-hour wait — where the driver managed to get lost and not be able to find the station there. Not the kind of thing that has me in any hurry to take another Greyhound trip.The union is gone, the pay isn’t nearly that good anymore, and Greyhound will hire anyone who has — or can get — a CDL to drive a coach. That means anyone. On a trip to North Carolina from New York City some years ago, we pulled into Richmond and the bus made an unexpected stop prior to pulling into the terminal and unloading us . . . several blocks from the terminal. The driver got off and went into the store. I was wondering if there was some sort of problem, and thinking it had to be pretty bad if we couldn’t make it the remaining mile and a half to the terminal to deal with it. But there was no problem. The driver re-emerged from the store a few minutes later with a couple cartons of cigarettes. He made a personal stop, on our time, to buy some low-tax Virginia smokes to take back to New York with him.And that’s before we even go there about the one a few years back, out West, who had some sort of mental breakdown, and refused to travel further, quitting her job in some hick town in Utah and leaving a busload of passengers stranded. Twice. On the same run. The first time she did it, the local cops intervened and made her get back on the bus and continue the trip. In the next town, she abandoned the bus and its passengers, and vanished completely.Or the one earlier this year who pulled off into a rest area on I-80 in Pennsylvania, and checked into a motel next door to take a nap, leaving the coach -- full of passengers who had no idea what was going on -- just sit there. Availability of drivers is spread pretty thin, too, and safety issues have been raised over drivers exceeding their allowed hours, working irregular shifts, and not getting enough rest.Ninety percent of automobile drivers rate their driving skills as ‘above average’. And you’re asking people to take the bus instead, while you hire drivers who do things like THAT?But when your customer base is made up of losers in life who have no choices, and deserve no better . . .FirstGroup may be sincere in its desire to turn it around someday, but lots of days can come and go between now and then and in the meanwhile, Greyhound is run by people who don’t give a shit. They’ve long ago reduced the entire company -- the entire industry — to something its users have to use because they have no choice, there are enough of those people that their customer base is assured. Anyone else that might consider taking a bus isn’t going to put up with it, so they’re not making the investment in drawing any other customers. Want to fix it? You’ve got coaches and terminals across the country, and you’ve only got this much money to work with, and that’s all you’ll have each year, if even that much, for however long it takes — where do you start?Greyhound is a post-mature company. Seth Godin used to say the same thing, over and again, about American Airlines until they got bought out: the things about American Airlines that made American a post-mature company are probably the reason it couldn’t hope to continue on its own and had to end up in bankruptcy and be bought out. (And in looking through his material for just one of his blog posts on the subject that would serve as typical and succinct to explain just why Seth felt that way about AMR, two things happened: 1) I just gave up and linked the Google search instead, and 2) I came across this little gem for the first time, and no, despite the fact that Seth is one of my favorite bloggers and the marketing expert I respect most, I swear I don’t recall ever having seen it before I wrote what I’ve written here, that you’ve read thus far.)That’s probably why Greyhound launched BoltBus — of course, competition from Chinatown buses and curbside carriers might have been a factor, and they wanted to have their hat in the ring on that business model; but I’d bet that even Greyhound gets it that they may just have to junk Greyhound and start over.What’s going to happen next?I haven’t completed costing it out, but it’s truly amazing how little the initial investment it would take to completely disrupt Greyhound and the other major carriers.Here’s how I’d go about it:Start in a small geographical region, work outward: Our initial, Winston-Salem, N. C. base, would be capable of functioning as a self-contained regional carrier. Adding a second one in Greenville, N. C. (from which, by itself, we could cover all of the same routes as the now-defunct, Seashore Transportation Company did for several decades) would give us statewide coverage.Additional bases - each the base of a service area having a 200-mile radius - would give us a corresponding increase in coverage. Each additional base also allows a synergy in terms of allowing every station within the operating area of each base to sell tickets to any location within the operating area of any other.Not only does adding bases expand our service area (e.g., Bethlehem, Pa. and Macon, Ga., in the next map), but adding bases within our existing service area (e.g., Charlotte in the next map) allows us to offer more direct runs with fewer connections, simplify our operations at the nearby bases, and add to our driver base (hiring drivers in Charlotte and having them based there would allow us to make do with fewer drivers at the nearby Winston-Salem and Columbia bases).Once we have a base in Bethlehem, a station in Savannah, and stations in most major cities in between, we can offer express runs up and down the entire East Coast that only stop in major cities.From there, it's a simple matter of expanding westward with new bases, and new coaches. (It’s scalable. We will have to buy the first several coaches that we operate, but once we show that we can generate the cash flow consistently, expansion is a simple matter of hiring and training new drivers, establishing the bases and depot stops, and leasing more coaches.)There's no need to 'beat' Greyhound. As we expand, we'll simply render them irrelevant.Smaller coaches: These would give us the flexibility to serve communities that cannot be served profitably by a full-sized coach. Because these smaller coaches are not restroom equipped, we take care to schedule a rest stop every two hours or so en route. I’d bet, however, that communities who’ve been without scheduled Greyhound or Trailways service for ten to thirty years now, would be happy they’re getting a bus at all.The average number of people who are, at any given moment, on board a Greyhound bus is 27 — and that's when you calculate into the average runs in crowded Northeast areas where the bus stays pretty full. So, why tie up a half million in capital for a full-size coach, when you can put that many on board one of these for $72,000?For more heavily-traveled runs, you might want to have a 36-passenger coach available. With a lav — these coaches (the way I submitted the specs) are for longer, busier runs and would come restroom equipped. Still, the investment required to put two Greyhound full-sized coaches on the road would give us five of these to work with:Not quite what you’re used to seeing as prevailing industry standard now. (Or is it? Can you tell the difference by looking? Besides no leather?)But . . . if your typical passenger load is 27 passengers, I have it on pretty good authority that 36 seats isn’t, historically, an altogether bad size for a coach. Basic arithmetic has a little to do with it of course; but anyone my age or older might recall the sixties, when those ubiquitous General Motors 36-passenger coaches like you see below were the backbone of both Greyhound’s and Trailways’ fleets . . . (Both of these are GMC PD-4104’s, built between the early ‘50’s into the early ‘60’s. I think more of that model were produced than any other coach model ever made, before or since. Back then, that size was quite normal.)Be anal about stations and terminals, and the stuff that happens around them: If I appear to have thought about this for some time, and seem to have much of the business plan written up for it already . . . well, yes, I have. I came up with the idea for a bus company nearly twenty years ago; and was inspired to do just that, in the sort of place where some guys go for a different kind of inspiration altogether: a porn shop.That was literally where the Greyhound/Peter Pan station in New Britain, Connecticut was located: a cigar store with a section in the back, quite visible to waiting bus passengers, devoted to pornography; complete with the occasional porn pervert browsing through the material on display. My car was in the shop one week when I was living in Connecticut, and I had to catch a bus into Boston, so I was kind of stuck with it. I recall thinking, I don’t want to be around this shit — and while I'm going on a tear with it, let's look at a few other things I don't want to be around that you see all the time in even 'average' bus stations. Filth and dirt. Overpriced, low-quality food, if there's any food at all. Homeless people hanging out. Panhandlers. Creeps loitering in and around the restrooms. Uncomfortable seating. Location in bad areas of town. All the things that everyone hates about bus terminals, but that even motorcoach operators seem to think is quite normal, that 'goes with the turf', about bus terminals. And it seems to get worse and worse. And now, this . . .And I started making notes and outlining some ideas during the ride to Boston that very day.New Britain, Connecticut: How not to do it.We would only contract with reputable businesses for our agency stops, and insist as part of our agency agreement that they maintain their facilities in accordance with our standards. If you want your establishment to be one of them, it will be listed on TripAdvisor, and we do read your reviews. We’d regularly inspect our agency stops to insure that they are clean, comfortable, have reasonable accommodations for waiting passengers, and are managed in alignment with the way we operate our own stations and terminals.This goes for public facilities (the city-owned bus terminal in Winston-Salem, N. C., was in the news this past week because of a bedbug infestation), and shared Greyhound facilities, too. I’ve seen what Greyhound will let them get away with, and they can be the worst offenders.Not the sort of thing I want to see at my bus terminal.Good security is a non-negotiable. Passengers are absolutely entitled to a safe, comfortable wait, and you don’t see homeless people, panhandlers, or people who have no reason to be there loitering about. If I wouldn't want my fourteen-year-old niece waiting alone for a bus at your location, your location is not going to be a depot stop for my bus company.Good security is not negotiable — and this isn’t what I call good security. If your ticket window requires bulletproof glass, you’re probably selling tickets to people I don’t want as passengers. If that’s what it takes to achieve security in the part of town you’re in, you’re in the wrong part of town.I want it done right. I’m just weird that way. It’s clean, it’s comfortable, it doesn’t smell bad, you don’t mind being there, there is food and refreshments available, and it isn’t too badly overpriced . . .Bottom line: we would rather simply have a roadside or street stop, and provide only curbside service in a town, than to have a bad depot or station. At least, everyone knows to not expect too much from having to wait on the side of the road.Family-friendly: One thing you might pick up on in our advertising is how all of our advertising pics show families? Mommies and daddies taking a trip with the kids, like they do in Europe? Many of us just take it for granted that bus travel is for people who have no other way to get there, and that you're not likely to meet anyone worth knowing if you do have to take the bus for some reason.For this bus company, we'd be resurrecting our own twist on the old "You meet the nicest people on a Honda" blue ocean strategy from the sixties, that opened up a vastly larger market for motorcycles than previously existed among just the Harley riders and their hellraiser wannabes, when Honda motorcycles first made their appearance in the U. S.(Besides, we remember when bus travel wasn't just for the riff-raff . . . Maybe I’m getting old, but I come from a time when people remembered what it was like to actually like buses and bus travel. Lots of people still would, if you gave them half a chance. ‘Blogs’ didn’t make their appearance until about ten years ago, yet the web abounds with websites and bulletin boards and user groups made up of people who are into the history of buses.)And our buses, and terminals, must be pretty convenient, safe and comfortable, if families and nice old folks — people who have a choice and would find another way to get there if our fleet and facilities were run down and nasty — choose to use them.The old Southern good-ol’-boys who used to run the carriers in the sixties, and who were so traumatized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, are all gone, retired or died off by now; but even today the mindset, even by more well-meaning, ‘liberal’ politicians, officials, and bus company executives, is that the bus is for people who don’t have cars.Let’s rethink that: The bus is for everyone. Even people who have a choice — especially people who have a choice. Now, what can we do to have them CHOOSE taking the bus?Instead of wandering the mall, how can we talk some of these retired folks into taking a day trip to the zoo? (Of course, putting the North Carolina Zoological Park on the schedule might help . . .)What kind of attractions are there in Boone that we can perhaps work with so that we can sell day trips there: get some people on a nearly empty outbound bus in the morning, who’d come home on an otherwise nearly empty inbound bus in the evening?I’d put one or two hotel sales people to work on this one.The airport is your friend, not your competitor: Making a point to offer scheduled service to large airports on our lines opens up an opportunity for a businessman in, say, Alamance County, to get to Raleigh-Durham International Airport for his flight.Service to airports opens up another opportunity. As we contemplated service to Newport News, Virginia and were stuck for an appropriate station location, it dawned on us: Newport News-Williamsburg International Airport is one of the few airports of its size, in any city the size of Newport News, that is located right in the middle of the city that it serves. And more to the point, the success and perhaps even survival of Newport News-Williamsburg International depends upon its ability to compete with Norfolk International Airport, which is not that far away. Why not just plan on putting the terminal there if they’ll let us?The airport is our friend, not our competitor. No one who can afford to fly to L. A. or Houston from the east coast is going to take the bus. And if you're not going that far away (say, between Newport News and Norfolk), the bus makes so much more sense.So, we consider not only large airports like Raleigh-Durham, Piedmont-Triad, Charlotte, Atlanta, and the Washington airports as we plan our routes; but also the smaller regional airports, such as Fayetteville Regional, Jacksonville (N. C.), and Richmond. For the opportunity to shag air passengers away from Charlotte, Greenville-Spartanburg should be willing to offer us much better terms and facilities than, say, the bus deck at Union Station in Washington, D. C. ($30,000 per year per 'slip', and I'll buy you dinner if you can prove to me that Greyhound pays that much).To solidify our market position in this area, we will be offering reduced rates from all airports to outlying, larger cities.Greyhound can fuss all they want about ‘competition’ from low-cost airlines. But Southwest Airlines doesn’t fly to North Wilkesboro, or Quakertown, or Waterbury . . .From us, you get the scenic tour: One thing about taking the bus that used to drive people nuts - even in the heyday of buses, at the height of their popularity - is that the bus stopped in every little hick town, which slowed down the trip and made getting where you wanted to go take longer.We can't avoid that: this company was developed and designed to serve smaller communities that Greyhound considers not worth having.So we're going to try and turn that into a selling point, create a new context for it, suggest an alternate way of looking at it. From us, you get the scenic tour. (Note the pics of small town Americana -- within the areas that we serve -- located here and there around our website.)I originally contemplated it as a Trailways carrier, but despite the access to the rich history and Trailways' place in 20th century Americana which we would love to have as part of our own, doing so doesn't appear to be workable.(Trailways now requires of new members — which they don’t recruit very diligently, and seem to not care too much if they never add another one —that your bus company has been in business for at least five years prior to applying for Trailways affiliation. By the time we’ve been in business for five years, we’re going to have so much invested in any brand we use in the meanwhile, that we’re not going to want to give that up, change all the livery and the signage and the website and the promotional material, paint all of the coaches red, and go Trailways. Nor do I like the requirement that if we expand scheduled service into a geographical area, we have to first obtain the consent of any Trailways carrier in that area — most of whom are charter carriers and should have no say in scheduled services. And if a carrier, even a Trailways carrier, who offers scheduled services wants to have his crappy operation protected from competition; well, that’s why Satan invented state utility commissions who regulate competition between motor carriers that operate within the state, and those carriers’ political connections on those commissions. I’m not signing up for something that requires me to suck up yet another layer of such regulation.)Still, anticipation of our market position as a would-be Trailways carrier while it lasted as part of the plan; with Trailways’ historic, Mom-and-apple-pie small town roots, opened up some added appreciation of this particular market position.Don’t be Greyhound-dependent: We'll work with Greyhound, and endeavor to maintain a positive relationship with them wherever possible. We're not going to get sucked into a stand-up fight with them where we can avoid it. It is to the much greater benefit of both us and Greyhound that we work together, and play and get along well together.Greyhound is famous for its ‘running dog’ mascot. We plan to use a black cat.But even if we don’t, the harm will be limited to slowing us down for a few years -- after which, we'll catch up to and surpass Greyhound with a vengeance.We contract our own stations, terminals and depots; and avoid sharing facilities with Greyhound unless: 1) the facilities meet our standards. and 2) we control the ticket counter - or at least don't stand to be hurt badly by Greyhound or a third-party agency engaging in favoritism toward Greyhound or another carrier against us in ticket sales from that location. (Most of our passengers - and ticket sales - to and from places where we’d use Greyhound as an agent, travel to and from smaller cities and towns not served by Greyhound. So if you approach a Greyhound ticket counter in one of those places, and want to purchase a ticket to a town served only by us, guess which carrier Greyhound is going to sell you a ticket on?)We’d have no "pooling" agreements with Greyhound, and do not intend to enter into any. Could we ask as part of such a deal that Greyhound not expand its service or not add any more runs to the area in competition with us? No - that would be illegal under federal antitrust law (unless the Surface Transportation Board okayed it): we'd just have to trust them, and rely upon a built-in disincentive in investing their money, equipment and resources into a line that would produce revenue that would have to be shared with us. With such an agreement in place, could we expand our service within the areas affected by the pooling agreement? Yes -- but why should we make the investment of funds, coaches, drivers and other resources, only to have Greyhound collect a percentage of the revenue even if they choose not to match the investment? Besides, the whole scheme smacks of the dystopian "Railroad Unification Plan" and the "Steel Unification Plan" in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Several companies that have gone into pooling agreements with Greyhound -- for example, Carolina Trailways, Seashore Transportation -- have since disappeared, and so have many of their runs.Eight mid-size coaches to start out, at about seventy-five grand a pop? . . . one convenience store (which would be a revenue source in itself), with a rear loading area, to use as a central base terminal? . . . It’s doable.There’s an opportunity in it. Right now, gas in the U. S. is cheap, by contrast to some recent years. And regardless of the price of gas in the U. S., we pay less for it than any other country on earth except Venezuela. Even Canadians pay three to four times as much. How long can that last? Eventually, U. S. gas prices are going to have to get in line with the others. We need to have some more public transportation options at the ready when that time comes.Much of the investment involved would be getting your ducks in a row in advance, just doing the work setting it up. The burn rate for the first year is more of a source of concern to me than the capital outlay . . .Your only competitors are people who don’t want to have any money invested in anything. They’ve already squeezed everything they can out of it, and can’t squeeze it any further without crushing it completely. They feel that doing so won’t expand their customer base significantly. But it’s been the late sixties since they’ve really tried. And since the customer base they’re left with has nowhere else to go — well, they’re not going to be easy to work with about personal needs, and individual attention, and refunds where appropriate.Greyhound and the other carriers have no idea just how vulnerable that they — and their entire business model — are.

Glass movie reviewGlass movie reviewGlass movie reviewThe main plotNearly 20 years after turning in Elijah Price to the authorities at the ending of "unbreakable" (2000), David Dunn has embraced his superhuman vigilante ego dubbed "The Overseer" and is aided by his now adult son Joseph. After apprehending two male delinquents who have assaulted a man for views on the internet, Dunn returns to his business of "Dunn Home Security" and it is revealed that he is hunting after Kevin Wendell crumb/Horde/Beast, after the events of his exploits in the events of "Split" (2016) which in this time-line occurred 3 weeks ago. Upon returning home, David struggles with the fact that his wife left him, not being able to cope with her husbands superhuman exploits and beliefs.Meanwhile, Kevin Wendell Crumb/The Horde has kidnapped a small group of cheerleaders and holds them hostage, preparing to feed them to the Beast in an abandoned factory. Dunn walks through the streets the next morning, brushing against people who pass him by in the crowds in order to see into their past and deduce who the Beast is. He brushes against the nine-year-old personality of Kevin and sees a flashback of him speaking to corpses of young women his ego the Beast had just killed. That night, while Kevin transforms into the Beast and presumably attacks a group of homeless people, Dunn dons the rain-slicker overcoat of the Overseer and arrives at the factory. After freeing the girls, he is attacked by the Beast who is quicker and more agile than him. But Overseer is stronger than the Beast, and when the Beast attempts to crush him, Overseer leaps out of a nearby window, causing them both to land in the streets below.The two rise up and charge each other once more but are stopped by a group of police led by a mysterious woman who encourages Dunn to give himself up to avoid hurting officers of the law. The Beast is conditioned by flashing lights which the force have and is reduced to a confused and scared Kevin. The two are then arrested and brought to Raven Hill Memorial Institution. Joseph watches helplessly as his father and Kevin are placed in holding cells. Dunn is placed in a room with water sprinklers which will go off if he attempts to escape. Kevin is held in a room with hypnosis lights meant to flash should he ever show outright forms of violence. Also in the Institution is Elijah Price, still serving his time for bombing the Eastrail 177 in order to find David Dunn and discover his powers of physical invincibility. The mysterious woman from earlier reveals herself to be Dr. Elle Staple, a psychiatrist.Elle Staple tries to convince the men that they are normal people with compulsions of grandeur but consistently fails. She then tries to appeal to Price's mother, Joseph Dunn, and Casey Cooke, former victim and friend of Kevin, but fails again. Staple gives the men three days to be convinced that they are deluded figures and not super-humans, otherwise they will be handed over to trial for their crimes. Staple then calls Dunn and Kevin into a room to test their psyches. However, a seemingly dormant and unresponsive Elijah Price (still wheelchair-bound from the broken spine he received from his fall down a flight of stairs in "Unbreakable") is wheeled in and brought alongside the men, much to David Dunn's disgust in being associated with him. During the meeting, Staple brings to mind Kevin's past abuse from his mother which spurred the transformation of the Horde, as well as the time David was nearly drowned in a swimming pool which nearly killed him- bringing to mind the first time water was revealed to be his kryptonite. She then tests Price's psyche by bringing to mind a time in which he broke his arm on a ride at a carnival, bringing to mind the extreme fragility of his bones.Later that night, Elijah Price breaks free from his cell and meets with Kevin who is in his "Patricia" personality. After an intelligent discussion, Elijah Price reveals that he has not been taking his sedative medication and instead hiding it inside his wheelchair, thus keeping his wits about him and sharp as ever. He encourages Kevin/Patricia to meet with him the next night and show him the "Beast." Before Price leaves Kevin/Patricia asks what his name is. Price turns his head and replies, "First name Mister....Last name...Glass."Upon returning to his room, Price is captured by Staple who performs a pre-frontal lobotomy on him knowing that his genius must be quelled before he can put any plan into motion. The seemingly brain-dead Price is brought back to his cell but suddenly comes alive and kills his caretaker by slashing his throat with a shard of broken glass. It is then revealed that Price had planned to be caught by Staple, and had sabotaged the machine earlier should the operation be conducted on him. Price then escapes to Kevin's cell and deactivates the "hypnotic lights." He and the beast make their way to a secret room where Kevin transforms into the Beast and looks over Price, discovering that he has been broken. The Beast immediately takes a liking to Price but not before Price explains his plan to have the Beast and the Overseer battle each other at the top of the highest skyscraper in the city of Philadelphia which has just been erected. It is there that the whole world will see and discover that superheroes do indeed exist. The Beast agrees and helps Price make his way through the facility.Price then communicates with David in his cell and explains that he had deactivated the water sprinklers. He encourages David to escape but David initially refuses. Price then explains that should David refuse to escape and fight the Beast, Price will blow up a chemical company, killing many people. Having no other, choice, David reluctantly breaks down the door and dons his rain slicker and runs out of the institution.Price and Beast begin by confronting an orderly who had maltreated Price for years earlier. The Beast crushes the orderly and forces him to kneel before Price before beating him to death as Price watches, shaking his head at the man's stubbornness. The Beast then wheels Price through the halls, beating down every security force that tries to hinder them. The Beast then captures two nurses and forces them into a van where he keeps them hostage. Two police officers show up but the Beast makes short work of them.Price's mother, Joseph, and Casey arrive in time to see the Beast see the Overseer approaching. Price sits back in his wheelchair and watches in excitement as the Beast charges Overseer and the two engage in a fight. Staple also sees this and calls up security. Casey rushes out, hoping to calm Kevin down but he is too busy fighting Overseer. Price recognizes her as "the one the Beast let go" and smiles in fascination at her. Armed policemen arrive and separate Overseer from the Beast, by are quickly overpowered by each of them. Overseer manages to push the forces attacking him into an enclosed compartment before locking them in while the Beast manages to kill and eat some of his attackers. Overseer frees the nurses the Beast had held hostage and is then attacked by the Beast who has been informed by Price that the Overseers weakness is water, as well as directing him to a water tank the institution uses.Joseph intervenes and explains to Kevin that Kevin's father was on the Eastrail 177 as well which Price had destroyed, thus killing Kevin's father and creating the Beast. Upon hearing this, Price is overcome with delight and amazement upon realizing he created both a superhero and a super-villain, and declares himself a mastermind. The Beast thanks Price for creating him, but then explains that he must protect Kevin at all costs- right before breaking Price's collarbone. Overseer tries to distract Beast, saying that his fight is with him, which Price finds amusing. The Beast then punches Price in the chest, breaking his ribs which pierce his lungs and mortally wound him. Price exclaims with pain and falls out of his wheelchair, dying upon the ground.The Beast flings Overseer/David Dunn into the water tank and fights him in there, easily overpowering him. But Dunn manages to break through the wall and the two splash out onto the institution's lawn. The water from the tank pours out as well and fills a nearby pothole. The Beast says to Dunn that they will finish their battle at the top of the skyscraper and begins running off in that direction. Staple convinces Casey to calm the Beast down to avoid any other violence and she agrees. Casey catches up to the Beast and appeals to him, causing him to calm down and revert back to the innocent Kevin. Once his defenses are down, a sniper shoots Kevin in the stomach now that the bulletproof skin of the Beast is gone. Kevin bleeds out and begins dying.More police forces show up and Joseph asks them to help his father as he is very weak. One of the Security forces grabs David and drags him over to the water-filled pothole, forcibly drowning his face in it. David is too weak to fight back and his easily overcome. Staple arrives and orders the guard to wait as she grabs David's hand. He then sees a flashback to her life in which she is a member of a secret society who monitors the actions and works of superhuman beings and quells them should they draw too much attention. She asks David that if she convinced him he was human she would have let him live, but Price's and the Beast's machinations prevented that. She then leaves and David realizes his true insignificance as the guard repeatedly bashes David's face into the puddle, ruthlessly drowning him.Kevin dies in Casey's arms, finally finding the light and finding peace in the safety of his friend's arms. Elijah lays dying in the parking lot, a broken and pitiful mess. Staple arrives and tells him that she and members of her following have suppressed superhuman masterminds to retain a safe society to prevent overarching divides of "gods" among men. After Staple leaves, Elijah Price's mother kneels over her dying son. Price explains painfully that he was not a mistake to which his mother smiles proudly at him saying, "No. You were spectacular." Price smiles wryly and dies peacefully.Believing her mission a success, Staple deletes the footage of all the security cameras which recorded the fight between Overseer and Beast. However, upon closer examination she realizes that Price had hacked the computers and live streamed all the events to a private network. Thus, it was never Price's plan to escape the facility and force the Beast to battle Overseer at the top of the skyscraper, as such a plan would be too elaborate. His plan and everything he had worked for was now a complete success. Staple leaves the security room and screams in anger realizing her failure. Price's mother, Joseph, and Casey receive copies of the footage and upload it, revealing it all to the public in the Philadelphia skyscraper. The film ends with them sitting together as the videos of Overseer and the Beast and their fantastic feats are relayed and spread to everyone's feed and to the daily news, revealing the world of superheroes to the public.The main title of "Glass" appears on the screen one last time and the end credits are laced with shards of glass through which scenes from the film as well as the previous films of "Unbreakable" and "Split" connecting the whole story together.Glass movie reviewIncreasingly "Split 2" than "Unbreakable 2," M. Night Shyamalan has at long last created his initially immediate continuation, the concoction that is "Glass," uniting characters from two of his greatest hits. As the part of the bargain," "that film occurred in a similar universe as Shyamalan's 2000 film "Unbreakable," still his best work to date. The guarantee of the coda to "Split" is satisfied in "Glass," uniting Shyamalan's vision of the Freudian mind in the uncontrolled id of DID-distressed Kevin Crumb (James McAvoy), the controlling power of the super-inner self in David Dunn (Bruce Willis), and the mediator between the legend and the lowlife in the personality that is Elijah Price otherwise known as Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson). Indeed, Shyamalan is playing with comic book tropes, adding his turns to monologuing legends and scalawags who are surprisingly mindful of their own sort circular segments. There's a genuinely eager film covered in "Glass," and I do mean covered. The issue is that Shyamalan can't discover the story, enabling his account to wander, never picking up the force it needs to work. State what you will about "Unbreakable" and even "Split," they had a propulsive vitality that is missing here, at any rate halfway in light of the fact that any feeling of relatability is no more. "Glass" is a failure to discharge, and it's the sort of discouraging fizzle that damages much progressively given what it could have been.Moresover Unbreakable" and "Split" have heroes pushed into groundbreaking circumstances. The previous recounted to the account of David Dunn, the main overcomer of a loathsome train crash, who discovered that he was more than human. The last recounts to two stories—that of a young lady, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy, who returns here and is given woefully little to do), compelled to find her very own qualities, and that of a rationally sick patient who might be more than your normal individual determined to have DID.As "Glass" opens, we know David Dunn, presently referred to in Philadelphia as the secretive defender called the Overseer and working with his child (Spencer Treat Clark), is a hero. Furthermore, we know Kevin Crumb has a character considered The Beast that can climb dividers and take shotgun impacts. But then such a large amount of "Glass" is given to attempting to persuade David and Kevin that they are not super at all. In the quest for another contort finishing, Shyamalan makes an account stride back, covering such a large amount of a similar ground that the two past movies did as opposed to cutting another way. He's so fixated on consummation on a gotcha note that he defers any kind of account enthusiasm up to that point, essentially driving his group of spectators to track water until that point. Take some real time to contemplate what you know toward the part of the bargain restricted to what you knew toward the start and you'll understand how empty this entire endeavor has been. READ MORE

Glass movie reviewGlass movie reviewGlass movie reviewThe main plotNearly 20 years after turning in Elijah Price to the authorities at the ending of "unbreakable" (2000), David Dunn has embraced his superhuman vigilante ego dubbed "The Overseer" and is aided by his now adult son Joseph. After apprehending two male delinquents who have assaulted a man for views on the internet, Dunn returns to his business of "Dunn Home Security" and it is revealed that he is hunting after Kevin Wendell crumb/Horde/Beast, after the events of his exploits in the events of "Split" (2016) which in this time-line occurred 3 weeks ago. Upon returning home, David struggles with the fact that his wife left him, not being able to cope with her husbands superhuman exploits and beliefs.Meanwhile, Kevin Wendell Crumb/The Horde has kidnapped a small group of cheerleaders and holds them hostage, preparing to feed them to the Beast in an abandoned factory. Dunn walks through the streets the next morning, brushing against people who pass him by in the crowds in order to see into their past and deduce who the Beast is. He brushes against the nine-year-old personality of Kevin and sees a flashback of him speaking to corpses of young women his ego the Beast had just killed. That night, while Kevin transforms into the Beast and presumably attacks a group of homeless people, Dunn dons the rain-slicker overcoat of the Overseer and arrives at the factory. After freeing the girls, he is attacked by the Beast who is quicker and more agile than him. But Overseer is stronger than the Beast, and when the Beast attempts to crush him, Overseer leaps out of a nearby window, causing them both to land in the streets below.The two rise up and charge each other once more but are stopped by a group of police led by a mysterious woman who encourages Dunn to give himself up to avoid hurting officers of the law. The Beast is conditioned by flashing lights which the force have and is reduced to a confused and scared Kevin. The two are then arrested and brought to Raven Hill Memorial Institution. Joseph watches helplessly as his father and Kevin are placed in holding cells. Dunn is placed in a room with water sprinklers which will go off if he attempts to escape. Kevin is held in a room with hypnosis lights meant to flash should he ever show outright forms of violence. Also in the Institution is Elijah Price, still serving his time for bombing the Eastrail 177 in order to find David Dunn and discover his powers of physical invincibility. The mysterious woman from earlier reveals herself to be Dr. Elle Staple, a psychiatrist.Elle Staple tries to convince the men that they are normal people with compulsions of grandeur but consistently fails. She then tries to appeal to Price's mother, Joseph Dunn, and Casey Cooke, former victim and friend of Kevin, but fails again. Staple gives the men three days to be convinced that they are deluded figures and not super-humans, otherwise they will be handed over to trial for their crimes. Staple then calls Dunn and Kevin into a room to test their psyches. However, a seemingly dormant and unresponsive Elijah Price (still wheelchair-bound from the broken spine he received from his fall down a flight of stairs in "Unbreakable") is wheeled in and brought alongside the men, much to David Dunn's disgust in being associated with him. During the meeting, Staple brings to mind Kevin's past abuse from his mother which spurred the transformation of the Horde, as well as the time David was nearly drowned in a swimming pool which nearly killed him- bringing to mind the first time water was revealed to be his kryptonite. She then tests Price's psyche by bringing to mind a time in which he broke his arm on a ride at a carnival, bringing to mind the extreme fragility of his bones.Later that night, Elijah Price breaks free from his cell and meets with Kevin who is in his "Patricia" personality. After an intelligent discussion, Elijah Price reveals that he has not been taking his sedative medication and instead hiding it inside his wheelchair, thus keeping his wits about him and sharp as ever. He encourages Kevin/Patricia to meet with him the next night and show him the "Beast." Before Price leaves Kevin/Patricia asks what his name is. Price turns his head and replies, "First name Mister....Last name...Glass."Upon returning to his room, Price is captured by Staple who performs a pre-frontal lobotomy on him knowing that his genius must be quelled before he can put any plan into motion. The seemingly brain-dead Price is brought back to his cell but suddenly comes alive and kills his caretaker by slashing his throat with a shard of broken glass. It is then revealed that Price had planned to be caught by Staple, and had sabotaged the machine earlier should the operation be conducted on him. Price then escapes to Kevin's cell and deactivates the "hypnotic lights." He and the beast make their way to a secret room where Kevin transforms into the Beast and looks over Price, discovering that he has been broken. The Beast immediately takes a liking to Price but not before Price explains his plan to have the Beast and the Overseer battle each other at the top of the highest skyscraper in the city of Philadelphia which has just been erected. It is there that the whole world will see and discover that superheroes do indeed exist. The Beast agrees and helps Price make his way through the facility.Price then communicates with David in his cell and explains that he had deactivated the water sprinklers. He encourages David to escape but David initially refuses. Price then explains that should David refuse to escape and fight the Beast, Price will blow up a chemical company, killing many people. Having no other, choice, David reluctantly breaks down the door and dons his rain slicker and runs out of the institution.Price and Beast begin by confronting an orderly who had maltreated Price for years earlier. The Beast crushes the orderly and forces him to kneel before Price before beating him to death as Price watches, shaking his head at the man's stubbornness. The Beast then wheels Price through the halls, beating down every security force that tries to hinder them. The Beast then captures two nurses and forces them into a van where he keeps them hostage. Two police officers show up but the Beast makes short work of them.Price's mother, Joseph, and Casey arrive in time to see the Beast see the Overseer approaching. Price sits back in his wheelchair and watches in excitement as the Beast charges Overseer and the two engage in a fight. Staple also sees this and calls up security. Casey rushes out, hoping to calm Kevin down but he is too busy fighting Overseer. Price recognizes her as "the one the Beast let go" and smiles in fascination at her. Armed policemen arrive and separate Overseer from the Beast, by are quickly overpowered by each of them. Overseer manages to push the forces attacking him into an enclosed compartment before locking them in while the Beast manages to kill and eat some of his attackers. Overseer frees the nurses the Beast had held hostage and is then attacked by the Beast who has been informed by Price that the Overseers weakness is water, as well as directing him to a water tank the institution uses.Joseph intervenes and explains to Kevin that Kevin's father was on the Eastrail 177 as well which Price had destroyed, thus killing Kevin's father and creating the Beast. Upon hearing this, Price is overcome with delight and amazement upon realizing he created both a superhero and a super-villain, and declares himself a mastermind. The Beast thanks Price for creating him, but then explains that he must protect Kevin at all costs- right before breaking Price's collarbone. Overseer tries to distract Beast, saying that his fight is with him, which Price finds amusing. The Beast then punches Price in the chest, breaking his ribs which pierce his lungs and mortally wound him. Price exclaims with pain and falls out of his wheelchair, dying upon the ground.The Beast flings Overseer/David Dunn into the water tank and fights him in there, easily overpowering him. But Dunn manages to break through the wall and the two splash out onto the institution's lawn. The water from the tank pours out as well and fills a nearby pothole. The Beast says to Dunn that they will finish their battle at the top of the skyscraper and begins running off in that direction. Staple convinces Casey to calm the Beast down to avoid any other violence and she agrees. Casey catches up to the Beast and appeals to him, causing him to calm down and revert back to the innocent Kevin. Once his defenses are down, a sniper shoots Kevin in the stomach now that the bulletproof skin of the Beast is gone. Kevin bleeds out and begins dying.More police forces show up and Joseph asks them to help his father as he is very weak. One of the Security forces grabs David and drags him over to the water-filled pothole, forcibly drowning his face in it. David is too weak to fight back and his easily overcome. Staple arrives and orders the guard to wait as she grabs David's hand. He then sees a flashback to her life in which she is a member of a secret society who monitors the actions and works of superhuman beings and quells them should they draw too much attention. She asks David that if she convinced him he was human she would have let him live, but Price's and the Beast's machinations prevented that. She then leaves and David realizes his true insignificance as the guard repeatedly bashes David's face into the puddle, ruthlessly drowning him.Kevin dies in Casey's arms, finally finding the light and finding peace in the safety of his friend's arms. Elijah lays dying in the parking lot, a broken and pitiful mess. Staple arrives and tells him that she and members of her following have suppressed superhuman masterminds to retain a safe society to prevent overarching divides of "gods" among men. After Staple leaves, Elijah Price's mother kneels over her dying son. Price explains painfully that he was not a mistake to which his mother smiles proudly at him saying, "No. You were spectacular." Price smiles wryly and dies peacefully.Believing her mission a success, Staple deletes the footage of all the security cameras which recorded the fight between Overseer and Beast. However, upon closer examination she realizes that Price had hacked the computers and live streamed all the events to a private network. Thus, it was never Price's plan to escape the facility and force the Beast to battle Overseer at the top of the skyscraper, as such a plan would be too elaborate. His plan and everything he had worked for was now a complete success. Staple leaves the security room and screams in anger realizing her failure. Price's mother, Joseph, and Casey receive copies of the footage and upload it, revealing it all to the public in the Philadelphia skyscraper. The film ends with them sitting together as the videos of Overseer and the Beast and their fantastic feats are relayed and spread to everyone's feed and to the daily news, revealing the world of superheroes to the public.The main title of "Glass" appears on the screen one last time and the end credits are laced with shards of glass through which scenes from the film as well as the previous films of "Unbreakable" and "Split" connecting the whole story together.Glass movie reviewIncreasingly "Split 2" than "Unbreakable 2," M. Night Shyamalan has at long last created his initially immediate continuation, the concoction that is "Glass," uniting characters from two of his greatest hits. As the part of the bargain," "that film occurred in a similar universe as Shyamalan's 2000 film "Unbreakable," still his best work to date. The guarantee of the coda to "Split" is satisfied in "Glass," uniting Shyamalan's vision of the Freudian mind in the uncontrolled id of DID-distressed Kevin Crumb (James McAvoy), the controlling power of the super-inner self in David Dunn (Bruce Willis), and the mediator between the legend and the lowlife in the personality that is Elijah Price otherwise known as Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson). Indeed, Shyamalan is playing with comic book tropes, adding his turns to monologuing legends and scalawags who are surprisingly mindful of their own sort circular segments. There's a genuinely eager film covered in "Glass," and I do mean covered. The issue is that Shyamalan can't discover the story, enabling his account to wander, never picking up the force it needs to work. State what you will about "Unbreakable" and even "Split," they had a propulsive vitality that is missing here, at any rate halfway in light of the fact that any feeling of relatability is no more. "Glass" is a failure to discharge, and it's the sort of discouraging fizzle that damages much progressively given what it could have been.Moresover Unbreakable" and "Split" have heroes pushed into groundbreaking circumstances. The previous recounted to the account of David Dunn, the main overcomer of a loathsome train crash, who discovered that he was more than human. The last recounts to two stories—that of a young lady, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy, who returns here and is given woefully little to do), compelled to find her very own qualities, and that of a rationally sick patient who might be more than your normal individual determined to have DID.As "Glass" opens, we know David Dunn, presently referred to in Philadelphia as the secretive defender called the Overseer and working with his child (Spencer Treat Clark), is a hero. Furthermore, we know Kevin Crumb has a character considered The Beast that can climb dividers and take shotgun impacts. But then such a large amount of "Glass" is given to attempting to persuade David and Kevin that they are not super at all. In the quest for another contort finishing, Shyamalan makes an account stride back, covering such a large amount of a similar ground that the two past movies did as opposed to cutting another way. He's so fixated on consummation on a gotcha note that he defers any kind of account enthusiasm up to that point, essentially driving his group of spectators to track water until that point. Take some real time to contemplate what you know toward the part of the bargain restricted to what you knew toward the start and you'll understand how empty this entire endeavor has been.A large portion of "Glass" happens at Raven Hill Memorial Psychiatric Hospital. In what could be known as the preface, David/Overseer tracks Kevin/Horde down after the abhorrent man with different characters seizes four young ladies, holding them in a surrendered processing plant. The two men battle, and one quickly gets the feeling that something isn't exactly right. This standoff between two of the most significant characters in Shyamalan's history does not have the punch or innovative battle movement fans ought to anticipate. The pair head out a window and into the arms of Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), the sure specialist who transports them off to the equivalent psych ward that has been lodging Mr. Glass for right around two decades. Glass is kept in a profoundly vegetative state in a room in a similar wing as David and Kevin. Dr. Staple attempts to persuade every one of the three that they are not generally super at all. David's quality isn't that unusual and Kevin's forces as The Beast could be clarified away.In the midriff of "Glass," Shyamalan hits each beat more than once, drearily. Paulson gives a similar discourse on different occasions, and a bit with a brilliant light that can change which character of Kevin's overwhelms goes on perpetually ... and after that happens once more. Shyamalan is resolved to burn through the back accounts of these characters, notwithstanding utilizing film from "Unbreakable" and "Split" in flashbacks as though he doesn't understand that 95% of watchers have seen them. He appears to be so plan on the uncovers of his last fifteen minutes that he neglects to accept open doors to make the about two hours before that intriguing. For what reason is Raven Hill such a dull bore to take a gander at? For what reason is Shyamalan resolved to make another film about whether superheroes will be superheroes rather than simply expanding on the establishment he's made? Envision "The Avengers" retelling all the cause stories and after that scrutinizing whether The Hulk is extremely a superhuman or only a furious fella, READ MORE