Coach USA - History

History

Coach USA traces its history back to 1922 as Lackawanna Bus and later Consolidated Bus Lines, a small outfit operating local service in Bergen County, New Jersey and later along the Jersey Shore and throughout the New York metropolitan area founded by Jim and Denis Gallagher. Community Coach, today the headquarters of Coach USA, began operations in 1958 under Denis's brother, John. The latter took over the operations of Consolidated Bus Lines, using the operating authority of another company that the Gallagher family had purchased in Paramus, New Jersey three years prior; through other acquisitions by the Gallagher family, six of these companies would become subsidiaries of Coach USA at its inception in 1995, when Frank Gallagher sold the firms to Notre Capital Ventures.

At its inception, Coach USA consisted of six companies: Suburban Trails, Community Coach, Leisure Line, and Adventure Trails in New Jersey, Gray Line of San Francisco, and Arrow Stage Line in Arizona (not to be confused with unaffiliated Arrow Stage Lines). Listing on the NASDAQ in 1996 under ticker TOUR, and later switching to the New York Stock Exchange under stock ticker CYI, Coach USA, under the leadership of Richard Kristinik, would expand quickly, acquiring companies throughout the United States in the next three years to expand to over 5,000 buses and many more taxicabs, as its acquisitions also included yellow cab firms throughout the United States. During this time, the Gallagher family would start another company, Student Transportation of America, based in the area of its Coast Cities operation.

In 1998, Kristinik retired, and Larry King succeeded him. Stagecoach Group would purchase Coach USA in mid-1999 for $1.88 billion USD.

Under Stagecoach ownership and the helm of Frank Gallagher, the owner of its predecessors, Coach USA sought to continue expansion, but the company, hit hard by the loss of charter business after the September 11, 2001 attacks, caused Stagecoach to crash to a loss of over ₤524 million, at which point Stagecoach, having lost over 70 percent of its investment and now under the leadership of its founder, Brian Souter, after the downturn cost the previous CEO of Stagecoach his job, announced that all of the taxicab operations and most of Coach USA's subsidiaries were for sale, as Stagecoach sought to focus mostly on operations in the northeast, where Coach USA today maintains subsidized transit operations and scheduled service.

Retrenching, Stagecoach sold its companies in New England to Peter Pan Bus Lines. Companies in the Southwest, West, and Rocky Mountain regions were sold to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts to form Coach America, and companies in the southeastern United States were sold to Lincolnshire Management, rebranded as American Coach Lines (which was merged with Coach America in 2006), all at heavy losses. The contract transit division was flipped to competitor First Transit. As a result of the sale of most of Coach USA's operations, the company's headquarters were relocated from Texas to the Community Coach garage in Paramus, New Jersey. Eight of the sold companies would be reacquired when Coach America declared bankruptcy in 2012, along with Lakefront/Hopkins in Ohio, with the intent of expanding (and in the case of California, reintroducing) the Megabus brand.

Coach USA's operations today consist primarily of scheduled services in New York metropolitan area and Chicago metropolitan area, with a number of charter operations near Pittsburgh and scheduled operations in the Southern Tier of New York and southern Wisconsin, along with its Megabus operations throughout the eastern and central United States.