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Hi, n2e. It's great to have someone with an econ background looking at the Suburban Express article. You've proposed some sensible changes. But, as you can see, CorpM has a very strong point of view. The Suburban Express story is about a 19 year old kid who attacked incumbent Greyhound, decreased fares, increased frequency, and decreased travel times and then weathered attacks based on regulatory capture, predatory pricing, and (not covered in any press) harrassment by the Chicago Transit Authority, which leased space to Greyhound. It is novel in that S.E. sidestepped economic regulation which was designed to ensure legacy carriers (greyhound, et al) a fair return on their investment but which had morphed into a system that supported inefficiency, high fares, and lousy service. Since you teach, I imagine you can appreciate the issues we have with students trying to get what they want, regardless of the agreement they have with us. 

e have battled all sorts of fraud during the course of our history - people making fake tickets, tons of bad checks, people passing their receipt out the bathroom window to a friend who then tells driver he is getting back on, and so forth. Fraud has lead to collection action of various forms, and it recently got some negative press because a small handful of nasty little assholes decided to devote their lives to trashing us. Their actions have not impacted ridership, but they have frustrated my employees and I by trashing us online wherever they get the chance. My instincts tell me that the user who is most committed to injecting POV into the article was contacted by one of the haters, who works in PR for the university and has contacts in that world. 

The supposed ""controversy"" is a mish-mash of different issues that the haters are promoting, all rolled into one: 1) we filed 100ish small claims suits in a short period of time. the number was unusual because we had about a 2 year backlog of debts to collect; 2) A subcontracted driver was rude to a student who does not speak english. He was promptly reprimanded and we sought to apologize to the passenger, but did not succeed in identifying her. A loudmouth narcissistic attention seeking student who was on the bus posted the story to facebook from the bus and spent every waking moment posting the story everywhere he could. 3) This led to a situation on Reddit where the loudmouth and his friends were trashing S.E. as best they could and the moderator started manipulating the conversation, by deleting comments made in support of S.E. That got out of hand and our attorney sent a demand letter to the moderator. The moderator then exploited free-speech bloggers and caused the BIG STORY to spread. Self-interest came into play - Reddit is owned by conde nast. Reddit benefits from awareness of reddit. Reddit can only exist if users are free to say whatever they want. Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica. Ars Technica wrote several blog posts about how horrible SE is for trying to suppress free speech on reddit. See how this works? Downstream lower-quality blogs regurgitated the free-speech story.

Two of the haters, now armed with SOURCES, took to Wikipedia and transformed this https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Suburban_Express&oldid;=542659074 into a very skewed mess. Then the problem became recursive - bloggers mentioned wikipedia, which led readers to trash the wikipedia page even more. Wiki editors cited the articles that cited wikipedia and the list of blogs that had covered the matter grew and grew. Now, the haters assert that the body of trash-news justifies giving the trash significant weight in the article - to the point where the real story of the company is pushed out. You can see this in corpm's proposed edit. He wants to remove from the lede the fact that the company was started by a student, and other key facts.

In any event, I applaud your efforts to move the article in a more academic direction, and I'm glad that someone with an econ background has arrived on-scene. You may find some stuff here interesting: http://www.toeppen.com

Best   "