Greyhound. Need I say more?

The BBQ Pit
1

As a dirt-poor college student, my choices for transportation are severely limited. Since I go to school in one city and my wife goes to school in another city, we rarely see each other. Since school began we’ve had less than half a dozen weekends together, plus Christmas break. I have two kids—kids who live with my wife and that I do not get to see except on these all-too-infrequent visits. Our one vehicle is of limited reliability and can’t be trusted to make the three hour drive.

It is imperative that I get to see my family.

It is also imperative that I am able to return to school after visiting for the weekend.

So for spring break I buy round-trip tickets for the dog. 200 miles each way. I buy the tickets 6 weeks in advance. I print them off, and everything is good in the world.

The day to depart arrives. I go to the bus station and am surprised to find that it appears to be little more than a functioning homeless shelter. Okay, I can live with that. My stay here is temporary, and the smell old urine and body odor isn’t too overpowering. When the bus pulls up I board when called. It stinks, smelling like shit. There is some mystery white goo dripping from the back of the headrest in front of me, and the windowsills are filled with gum wrappers and broken potato chips. Barf. Okay, I can handle this… maybe… pull up some Dire Straits on the MP3 player, and think happy thoughts.

I arrive home in one piece (6 hours later), surprisingly unmolested and apparently uninfected.

Ten days later, it’s time to go back. I arrive at the bus station in my hometown, which happens to be a parking lot next to a gas station where the local heroin dealers make most of their sales. Fun.

I wait. And I wait. And I wait.

And I wait.

And I wait some more.

An hour after my bus was to leave (almost two after I had arrived), two buses heading north pull up simultaneously. The driver of one hops out, lights a cigar, and announces to the assembled (and by now angry) crowd of maybe 30 people “I hope y’all aren’t heading north, because both buses are full.”

I double check my ticket. Yep, right day, right time, right route. I look around. Everyone else is doing similar. Finally the grumbling starts. One woman has been waiting three days for a ride. One guy says he’s heading to jail because he has a court date the following morning and now can’t make it. The rest of the crowd starts yelling at the driver. He says over the shouting “call the 800 number the ticket and bitch! That’s all I know!” I look at my ticket. No 800 number, just a website URL.

The drivers go into the convince store, come out with soda and cigarettes, board their buses and quickly drive away.

Yes, I know pitting Greyhound is on par with pitting Wal-Mart: you get what you pay for. But hell. I paid good American dollars for that fucking ticket, a ticket that was supposed to guarantee me a ride: it had a date, time, and boarding number on it. Instead I have to make a flurry of phone calls, scrape together some gas money, and try to find some generous soul to take me back home so hopefully I can make it to class when they resume.

So fuck you, Greyhound. Fuck you in the ass with a rusty chainsaw. You stole my money. You promised me a ride—something very simple—and failed to deliver.

Go suck shit.

2

I’m amazed. 2 full Greyhound busses. I wonder when the last time that happened was?

3

the squalid conditions are bad enough but not being able to get a ride is even worse

4

MegaBus goes from the Twin Cities to Milwaukee to Chicago and back. It is efficient, cheap and comfortable. That is the only bus I have been on in my long career that I would ever recommend to anyone.

5

I do not understand why Greyhound, or any other transportation company, is allowed to sell more tickets than they have seats. They should be required by law to get the passengers to their destination at the time promised, and there should be huge fines and punitive damages for failure to do so. They know how many seats they have and they know how many tickets were sold. This should be treated as fraud.

6

I completely understand the mobile homeless shelter joke. I once took a greyhound from New York to Georgia, never again! I believe it was a 23 or 25 hour drive or something like that filled with screaming babies, shit diapers, horrendous body odor, urine and old cigarette smells, hookers making contacts for future business, loud, shouting matches littered with obscenities, but by far the worst was the nasty bitch behind me who was deathly ill sitting right by my head coughing, gagging, and dry-heaving the ENTIRE trip, I was so sure she would puke on me but at least I was spared that last indignity.

7

Most of the passengers that got off for smokes and soda looked like college students. It was the LA-Seattle route, so I’m guessing the end of spring break had a lot to do with it.

Boltbus runs part of the way I need, but stops short 80 miles north of my destination. I’ve take it once and was pleasantly surprised: clean, lots of legroom. The bus was nearly empty so that helped. The driver was a little Italian man who spent the drive complaining about the poor healthcare in the US, so that was certainly a con. But all in all not a bad ride for $13.

However, it does me no good if won’t get me to where I need to go.

My jerkwater town has just one car rental agency, but the one-way rental prices are astronomical. I suppose I could rent a little U-Haul pickup next time.

But Christ. Overselling the seats, letting the bus stay filthy… what a shitty business model. I suppose it stays in business because those that utilize it have no other options. Greyhound knows it can treat it’s customers like shit because they have no other choice.

8

Could you go on Craigslist and split the cost with three other people?

9

With his luck, the three passengers would be Ms. Spew-yer-guts, a deranged hooker and the guy who’s desperate to make his court date for cutting up his entire family.

10

A company that takes your money and then refuses to provide the agreed upon services is committing fraud, and ought to be held accountable.

Only reason they’re getting away with it is that their customers generally can’t afford lawyers. But I would make a point of not being a customer, from here on. Why am I paying you if you may or may not deliver?

11

In 1976 I was 18 and rode Greyhound from Pittsburgh to Sacramento. There was a “See America” special that was $76.00. I met many degenerates and shared their liquor. Good times!

12

Bonus points for a dismembered body in the trunk!

13

Considering the consequences to customers, who can easily be left stranded somewhere with nowhere to stay, it should be more than fraud. It should be something similar to abandonment for people in the medical profession. Just getting a refund doesn’t help someone who loses a job, or misses a court date, or just gets stranded in a strange city with nowhere to go and no way to leave because a carrier sold more seats than they had available.

14

Actually, that’s one of the services available on the bus.

15

I’m sorry to hear that Greyhound buses are now, apparently, rolling slums.

Thirty years ago I wanted to buy a Railpass and travel across the country – only there WERE no railpasses for Amtrak. My only option, if I wanted anything like that, was to get a 30 day Unlimited Travel pass on Greyhound. So I did.

I traveled from New York across the US to San Francisco, down to San Diego, and back, mooching of friends and relatives along the way, or staying in extremely inexpensive student housing if I didn’t know anyone there. It was great. I met a lot of military folk and lower-income people, but no degenerates like kayaker did. And no liquor.*

the buses were pretty clean, with nothing stuck in the windows, and with fully functioning restrooms. I could easily recommend it to anyone hitting the road with limited means.

Sad to hear it’s gone downhill.

*On another trip, though, between Boston and New York, I sat next to a guy who chain-smoked the entire trip, ignoring the “No Smoking” signs. It didn’t help that we were slowed down by severe snow, and it took the bus an hour to go from 200th street in Manhattan to the Port Authority terminal on 42nd. (20 blocks north-south in Manhattan is a mile, so we were making 8 miles an hour)

16

Maybe I sought them out. I sat in the back of the bus. I met an old alcoholic cowboy. His sister was in the hospital dying, and had sent him money to fly to California to see him one last time. He spent the all the cash except for enough for a one way bus ticket.

He had a pint of Black Velvet in each boot that he shared. When he ran out I gave him cash and he bought two more. It was an interesting trip.

17

When I was a teenager in 1974 and 1976, my mom and I made two trips on Greyhound from WI to Salt Lake City. As a kid, especially a farm boy, you don’t always catch things going on around you, but the bus riders seemed perfectly normal. We did tend to sit up front - don’t know if that made a difference. I always wanted to sit “upstairs” on the Super Scenicruiser, but never go the opportunity.

Greyhound, however, had some of the same problems mentioned - late, overbooked, plus lost luggage (don’t check it at the counter, but at the bus, we learned). I remember spending about 4 hours around midnight in Omaha waiting for the connection. My mom was worried, but she was a worrier. :slight_smile: Still, if there were drug addicts, I didn’t see them.

But the trip itself was fun. A real adventure (in a good way!). Go to see tons of the countryside. Probably inspired my fondness for driving cross country, rather than flying.

I wanted to be a bus driver when I grew up. Glad that didn’t work out!

18

Try riding Amtrak’s NorthEast corridor the Sunday after Thanksgiving. That will teach you the meaning of ‘oversold’. I started returning to college on Saturday to avoid those Helltrains.

19

Oh, I forgot to add the rest - about 10 years ago, I had occasion to ride from LA to Phoenix, again with my mom, because Amtrak stranded us in LA. It was NOT a fun trip, starting from the crowd around the LA depot at midnight, to the overcrowded bus, to the class of riders right out of some of these posts. When we stopped in Blythe, one of the passengers asked us when the bus to the prison left.

When I rode the busses in the 70s, that was prior to deregulation, and flights were expensive. Busses were a fair alternative. Now it seemed like Greyhound riders are people who can’t afford even discounted flight fares, and that’s poor!

The only available seats had, for some reason, been adjusted with about 1.5 feet of legroom. I had to ride sideways. It was beyond uncomfortable and moved into painful. I envisioned myself on Apollo 13 - just had to endure until we made it home.

20

Well, they’re not, in my experience. I take Greyhound buses several times a year in the northeastern US, most recently eight days ago westbound to Boston, and they’re comfortable, clean, well maintained, sometimes equipped with free (although slow) wifi, the works. Bus stations aren’t inspiring architecture but they’re not shitholes. My fellow passengers (and myself) may look a bit scruffy after a two hours’ nap on the bus but I haven’t seen any shit-smeared bums or vomiting drunks.

Now, I’m not calling the OP a liar, since I don’t know what area he was traveling, and bus service in different parts of the country can be very different. As far as I can recall, I’ve never taken a Greyhound bus south of DC or west of Buffalo. But I’ve never had a serious problem with the ones I’ve taken (or with any non-Greyhound coach carrier, for that matter).