By Sommer Mathis

The low cost bus business has certainly boomed over the last couple of years. While the Peter Pan/Greyhound and various Chinatown bus lines have been offering cheapo rides from D.C. to New York City and Philadelphia for a long time, they now compete with a long list of newcomers, many of whom offer extras like free wireless internet or leather seats. Megabus, the Greyhound-operated BoltBus, Vamoose, and DC2NY are just some of the companies hoping to lure you to inexpensive East Coast travel. And now a D.C.-based team of developers has launched a new site, BusJunction.com, that allows you to search all of their schedules at once.

Well, almost all of them. Washington Deluxe and MVP are notably missing from the line-up, but the Kayak.com-inspired idea is still a good one, and fairly well executed. Just put in where you want to travel to and from, pick the date and time, and you'll get a long list of options. And I do mean long: a random search for a weekday morning turned up more than 25 different departures. Your only choices for times are morning, afternoon or evening, so unless BusJunction.com can start offering more specific departure time searches, expect to get probably more schedules back than you really need.

After you select a ticket, where you end up at that point varies by bus company. Tickets for the newer lines like BoltBus and Megabus just redirect you to that company's web site. Selecting one of the Chinatown lines like Eastern/Todays or New Century will take you to gotobus.com to complete your purchase, itself a searchable clearinghouse for cheap bus tickets. In some cases, especially for trips to Philadelphia, you might be better off going to straight to gotobus.com, which doesn't include Megabus and BoltBus but does include more of the old-school lines.

BusJunction.com is definitely an idea whose time has come, but we hope the developers continue to make improvements to it. It would be great to be able to exclude specific companies, say if you've had a bad experience with that one and just don't even want to consider it. The site does mark certain features of the different bus lines in search results, such as wireless internet and the availability of outlets, but it doesn't let you select whether or not to ignore bus lines that don't offer those features. And you can sort your results by price and departure, but more sorting options, say by company or by pickup and dropoff locations, would also be welcome.