** Was intercity bus travel once pleasant as pictured in ads and promotional material?**
In one recent case in Canada, it certainly hit a new low of unpleasntness: Holy crap! Man be-heads fellow passenger on Greyhound in Manitoba!
I worked as a ticket agent/asst. mgr in Trailways and Greyhound bus stations from 1966 to 1978.
It wasn’t horrible travel, but yeah, one did get to experience the very drags of society on a regular basis. Damn, I could write a book, but nobody would believe the shit I’ve seen.
(One example: In 1973, we had a report of a drunk passed out in our bathroom in the Greyhound terminal my father and I ran in 1973. Verified this. Called the cops. They dragged him out, leaving a trail of pee behind him. Next day, a detective comes up and interviews me about the specifics. I ask why the interest? He says the dude done died in the drunk tank, so they gotta investigate. Crap!..and so very, very sad)
Only career field where I had my life regularly threatened…like, once a month.
I could write a book.
I took a bus trip in 1977 from Chicago to San Fran, we left Chicago at 12 noon (central) on Saturday and arrived in San Fran at 12 noon (pacific) on Monday.
It was not bad at all. The bus was clean we traveled on I-80 and we stopped at small towns and got plenty of opportunities to strech, to find small diners to eat at (think of Mel’s Diner type of places). We all made friends on the bus, and talked and played cards. It was fun. It seemed to take forever, and now that I’m used to getting from Chicago to SF in 4 hours I’d not take a bus unless I had to, but it wasn’t that bad.
Of course I was 12 years old traveling with my mum, maybe that made it seem fun
I ‘rode the Dog’ once.
Once.
I took the Greyhound from Boston to Miami in the late 70’s. Outside Tampa someone got on and sat next to me. He took a spoon and lighter and prepared a fix. He then removed his belt, wrapped it around his arm, and took out a needle. A woman turned around to stare at him and he said: “Whats’a matter lady, never seen anyone shoot up before?”. I’ll never forget it.
In the late 60’s and early 70’s I took Greyhound between Philadelphia and Montreal many times. It was OK. A little boring, but not too uncomfortable.
Since then I’ve taken it only a few times:
Around 1975, round trip Montreal to Cincinnati. That was a long ride – about 20 hours each way.
Around 1981, New York to Toronto overnight (yeesh, what a trip), then a week later Montreal to New York in the daytime (much better).
Around 1985, round trip Cincinnati to Columbus, OH. A quick and easy ride.
In Canada I have taken intercity buses quite often between Montreal and Ottawa and between Montreal and Toronto; they continue to be very nice for the most part.
Ed
Back in the day the alternative to Greyhound was not private transport, but rather more cramped local buses (think a bunch of people crammed on to benches) or hitchhiking. Having your own seat, real stations, schedules that leave somewhat on time, drivers you know arn’t drunk- these things must have seemed luxurious.
In comparison with other countries, Greyhound is plenty comfortable. Individual seats, air-conditioning, toilets…these things aren’t always a given (or even available) in some places. And I’ve always found the buses to be relatively clean and well maintained. Not eat-off-the-floor clean, but generally things aren’t broken or gross. I used to take it pretty regularly and never had any problems.
I think a lot of the reason why Greyhound gets a bad rap is Americans aren’t big on public space in general, and it is often a lower class of people who ride Greyhound (and people can get disruptive.)
In addition to my earlier comment, I think another factor is that some people just do what they are used to doing, and there are people for whom that is the bus. In my student days (late 1970s), Amtrak charged a dollar or two less than the buses did, to travel from downtown L.A. to Del Mar. It was only $5.50 back then. Still some people used the bus. Why, I can’t imagine when the train was cheaper and far more comfortable, but there you go. I think the bus is probably cheaper now.
This Greyhound history suggests the Yellow Coach works built lavatories into buses starting in 1934.
Here’s a May, 1935 Time article announcing Greyhound sleeper service between LA and Kansas City. These buses had lavatories, and indeed may have had them as far back as 1929, when an LA-San Fran service hit the roads.
My daughter goes to college about 150 miles away. She likes to come home now and again, and we will often go and get her, but she goes back on Greyhound (or the other way around).
It works well - the cost is about what we would spend in gas for the 300 miles round trip, and she is home in about four hours, not much more than it would take to drive.
The buses are clean, the seating is spacious compared to airliners, and the terminals at either end are relatively conveniently located. The passengers are mostly students like herself.
Were she closer, we would drive both ways. Were she farther away, she’d fly, and probably come home a lot less. It seems to work for this middle distance.
In the 1950-1970 era the bus still had at least a shot of being respectable compared to the alternatives.
Train travel had peaked and was on its way down in both quantity and service. By 1970 the Penn Central (itself a merger of the New York Central and Pennsylvania) had gone bankrupt. Amtrak wouldn’t appear until 1971.
Airlines were still tightly regulated by the federal government. Flying was expensive, and even when airlines served smaller areas, a lot of them were still using 1930’s-era DC3 aircraft. (Flying in an unpressurized DC3 in winter was much like riding in a Volskwagon Beetle with a faulty heater - except noisier and with more ear-popping.)
By contrast, Greyhound and Trailways were putting a lot of new stock into service and taking advantage of the Interstate Highways. Local buses went everywhere, and express buses took Joe Traveler from downtown to downtown. Sure, the bus stations could be scary, particularly at night, but the total experience of taking a bus, vs. train, vs. airplane wasn’t that much worse.
In Australia, flying domestically was very expensive and govt-regulated right up until about 1990. This meant there were a large number of bus companies competing for the interstate capital city runs in SE Australia: Brisbane - Sydney - Melbourne - Adelaide. These cities tend to be about twelve or thirteen hours apart, with not much between them. I did Sydney - Melbourne return by bus at this time, and it was bloody awful. There were no scary people on board, and the bus was clean, and the drivers were professional, but it was thirteen hours hurtling through the dark with wall-to-wall semi-trailers, no towns (they’d all been bypassed by the upgraded road), and one break at a shitty roadhouse at about 3am. I’m a big guy, and I could barely walk when I arrived.
Most of the Sydney - Melbourne bus companies seem to have disappeared with the arrival of cheap air tickets ($50 for the bus or $80 for an hour and a bit on a plane). Strangely, the other thing that killed the Melbourne-based companies was when their home state of Victoria legalised slot machines. Before that, the Melbourne papers were full of ads aimed at the grey hairs for day trips to the New South Wales border town of Albury, four hours away. Eight hours travel for four or five playing slot machines. I couldn’t imagine anything worse.
When Greyhound first introduced their Scenicruisers (must have been the early 1950s), they brought one to our elementary school for all the kids to examine. Compared to our school buses, it looked like a royal coach. It was another five or six years before I had that ticket to ride between Jackson, Tennessee and Detroit. It just wasn’t as lovely without my classmates.
Still, a long trip on the dog is something every aspiring writer should do at least once.
I don’t think the “Nitecoach” service of the 1930s was more than a concept briefly tried that didn’t pan out. The original concept of the Scenicruiser called for two levels along the entire length of the vehicle, and for sleepers, but that part didn’t make it into production. Later, around 1970, Trailways introduced an upscale service between points on the West Coast. There were on-board cabin attendants, food, and other amenities; somewhere on the Internet there’s one of their ads showing people lining up along a red carpet to board one of their buses, as one used to see leading out to the early jet airliners in the days when you usually still had to cross the tarmac in the open air to reach the airplane. But that also didn’t last long.
The usual type of bus used from shortly after WWII through the mid 1950s didn’t have bathrooms. The rearward interior shots you can see in the bus-related films in the Prelinger archive, make this clear. (Check out “The Bus Driver” and “America For Me” on the archive. The latter is an absolute hoot, be sure to check out the viewer comments, too.)
It’s too bad that no one has put together a really good general website on this stuff. Greyhound itself provides only the basics, and most bus-aficionado websites seem to be poorly and primitively done, for example with a few pages that have thousands of lines of tiny type and little more than simple exterior shots of vehicles. In particular, interior shots are very difficult to find.
Do any Greyhounds have TVs? Every highway bus I’ve been on in Taiwan has had several overhead TVs around the cabin for the passengers to watch, usually playing a DVD of some not-so-recent movie. More recently, each passenger has had a mini-TV built into the back of the next seat in front of him/her, and it’s able to channel select either the DVD of the day or one or two broadcast stations. The speakers are built into the headrest.
It’s not a barrel of laughs, especially when one has to get on the bus at 5:30 in the morning in some other town in order to make it to work in Taipei by 8:00 AM. But it’s hardly a bad way to get around.
Here they say:
Try driving to the NY are from western NY / Rochester area down rt 17 in a bug. Emulates that flying experience nicely when done in mid january=)
In 1980 I wanted to see the country. My plan was to buy a Railpass and ride across country, mooching off friends and relatives wherever possible, and getting cheap lodgings elsewhere. The one hitch in the plan was that there was no American railpass. So I bought a 30 day bus pass on Greyhound, sweet-talked myself a copy of their nationwide schedule (a book the size of a phone book), and did the same.
I have no complaints about the bus system. Terminals were no worse than, say, train terminals. Occasionally they were in seedy parts of town, but there were plenty of bright, clean, new ones. The buses were clean and pretty much on-time. You traveled with mostly poorer folk (most people will, I think, take their own car, if they have one, or fly, if they can) and members of the military. I would’ve preferred the train, because you can walk around and there’s more room, and it’s a bit more romantic. But I had no problem with bus travel.
I also used to take the bus to and from college in the 1970s. Again, no complaints, except for the time I was stuck next to an old guy who insisted on sneaking smokes in defiance of the rules.
Some in Canada do. I’ve travelled a few times between Calgary and Edmonton on Greyhound, and there has been a movie shown on the TVs hanging from the ceiling.
I was a young teenager in the late 50’s, and then a teenage soldier in the early 60’s. I sometimes took a Greyhound or Trailways bus from South Florida to points north and west.
Generally, I could beat the bus’s time by hitch-hiking, but there were times that I did use the bus. Example, the bus trip from Panama City, Fl to Miami took 17 hours, normal hitchin’ time was 12 hours.
I’ll say this about bus travel in those days: You would catch a real slice of life, much more so than when hitching rides. The first time I ever saw a woman breast feed a baby was when a young mom flopped a boob out and began the process. Doesn’t sound like much woop-woop today, but when you are 15…
On a ride from Nashville to Birmingham, I got on the bus and surveyed the available seats. Several seats were vacant, so why not sit beside the pretty girl? That was my first time to have a conversation with a prostitute. Oh, I’d seen them working the streets before, but never, actually, you know, talked to a hooker before that bus ride.
In fact, I don’t think I ever rode a bus when the ride didn’t provide material for a good short story.
My last bus ride was in November of 1973. Sometimes I think about buying a ticket and taking a bus trip, just for the hell of it. I can’t imagine that it would be boring.