I once lived in Los Angeles. Now I live 60 miles east. Walking around the other day, I saw a sign for Omnitrans, the local municipal bus authority, and remembered taking a trip on an RTD bus from this area into LA. I knew Omni trans went further east, and I know there are buses in Palm Springs. Can you connect to Palm Springs from LA, I thought?
What is the furthest distance you can go in the U.S. (measured from start to finish, rather than the meandering route) using only public buses? I want to exclude things like Greyhound, Rail links… maybe should even nix little mini-van service, although I bet putting that in would get you a lot further.
I will guess that a longest path does not go through California, nor through any state west of the Mississippi.
I bet the longest path goes through NYC or somewhere in the state of NJ.
Maybe I am too optimistic. For example, if there is no way to go from NYC to Philadelphia, I am overestimating how densely populated the Eastern U.S. is.
Can anybody connect Cincinnati to Cleveland?
Chicago to St. Louis?
I once travelled on a SEPTA train north of Philadelphia into Philly where I changed to another SEPTA train to Trenton, NJ, where I transferred to NJ Transit all the way to Manhatten.
Of course, strectching it a bit but AMTRAK is a public train so you could go coast to coast.
you can get to nyc from philly using the septa r7 line to trenton. in trenton you switch over to new jersey transit to nyc penn station. from nyc you could switch over to the mta and get to new haven conn. from new haven you can get to new london through the cttransit.
from new london you can take a ferry to martha’s vineyard or nantucket. from nantucket or martha’s vineyard you can take a ferry to boston.
This topic has come up in the last couple months, but I’ll be hanged if I can find it with a search. I also can’t remember what answer, if any, was settled on.
I believe the older thread restricted itself to light rail (no Amtrak or buses) – I think the answer involved some route that nearly made it from Baltimore to Boston, with just a ferry trip in there maybe. But since this one seems to restrict itself to buses, it’ll be a different answer. Although it possibly somewhere along the same corridor.
Using a route which I’ve partially taken before (detailed below), you can get from Pescadero, CA (north of Santa Cruz along the coast) to Gold Run (a little off Hwy 80 below Emigrant Gap), which almost gets you out of the state.
Pescadero to Gold Run is about 175 miles as the crow flies, and I’d figure well over 200 transit miles. It’d probably take you two days to match the schedules up, though it is possible to get from San Mateo County to Sacramento in a day, which is most of the trip. There might be a way to extend this, if there’s a bus that runs over 17 from San Jose to Santa Cruz, and maybe all the way down to Monterey or Salinas.
Now I’m willing to bet that if you can get from Palm Springs to L.A., there must be a way to get to Santa Barbara (or at least some ways into Ventura County). That’s a fairly good stretch right there.
How to nearly escape from California on public buses :
(some of these agencies, and a nice transit map of the SF Bay Area showing part of the trip, can be found at http://www.transitinfo.org)
SamTrans has a line that runs (not terribly often) all the way from Pescadero up through Half Moon Bay to Pacifica and from there to Colma, and from there into San Francisco (Transbay Terminal)
AC transit crosses the Bay Bridge and connects to downtown Oakland. From there you can take several buses to get around Oakland.
At Coliseum BART (and possibly points further north in Oakland ) you can catch Vallejo Transit which will take you to Vallejo, and from there to Solano Mall .
Another bus gets you to Vacaville. From there you take Yolobus to Davis, and then another Yolobus to Sacramento. You can take Sacramento RT to Roseville.
From Roseville, Placer County Transit will take you all the way to Gold Run. But it looks like you fall just short (well, 30 miles or more by the highway) of Donner Pass. If you could get to Truckee somehow, you could get on TART and cross into Nevada by going around Lake Tahoe.
OK…starting with Suffolk County bus lines on the far east end of Long Island, you could board the 10C at Montauk Point and transfer your way westward until you hit the Walt Whitman mall outside Huntington, where you could swap to the Nassau County bus system’s N79, which will take you into Jamaica Queens, where you would swap to the New York City bus system and make your way through Queens and into Manhattan, eventually homing in on the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Now you can catch the NJ Transit buses to cross the Hudson into New Jersey…
I’d be astonished if you could not reach Washington DC or Boston by continuing in this fashion, but I’m too lazy to look up the routes you’d use. I’ve done the NY-to-Suffolk ride myself, though, when the blizzard wiped out the Long Island Rail Road.
I actually live in Santa Cruz, and I am obsessed with public transportation, so I have actaully given this a lot of thought. I’ve long wanted to do a public transportation oddessy, and have spent a lot of time mapping out where I’d go.
It is possible to take a Montery Transit bus from Big Sur to Monterey. From there you take another bus to Watsonville, where you switch to Santa Cruz Metro. Take the 71 to downtown Santa Cruz, and hop on the Highway 17 express to San Jose. From San Jose you can take VTA to BART, and from there you can follow panamajack’s plan up to almost Donner Pass.
I can’t believe someone else has thought about this.
