Vid: Chinatown Bus Pioneer Fung Wah Strangled by Federal Bureaucracy

The company has burned through $3 million, as regulators spend a year and a half deliberating its fate.

In 1993, Pei Lin Liang, an immigrant from Guangdong province and a former noodle factory deliveryman, started a local van service in New York City that would later become Fung Wah, the very first "Chinatown bus" company. Liang deserves credit for launching a revolution in "curbside busing"—in which motor coaches pick up and drop off passengers right off the street—now the fastest growing mode of intercity travel in the U.S.

Last March, the U.S. Department of Transportation forced Fung Wah to halt its operations, which was part of a broader safety crackdown on the industry. As Reason reported last year, the closing of Fung Wah was the result of regulatory incompetence—but an even greater injustice is what's happened in the year and a half since.