Ridin’ Dirty: An Enlightening Journey on America’s Intercity Bus System

45 Replies to “Ridin’ Dirty: An Enlightening Journey on America’s Intercity Bus System”

1. I grew up in Raleigh, so this made me smile.

   1. Considering Raleigh is where we go to class it up, I’d hate to experience a bus ride out of Fayetteville. :/

2. I have stories about Greyhound trips along I-5 in the past few years that had incidents similar to those described. The tourist-oriented QuickCoach to BC has been more comfortable.

   Furthermore, as one who has used public transit routinely for 50 years, I would note that exciting, sometimes frightening, incidents are an occasional part of the experience, both inter-city and on intra-urban buses and trains. I’ve never been so scared that I stopped riding, but the negatives are always on my mind. Yes, I sit near the front, especially at night.

   1. Indeed. I did I-5, Los Angeles to Seattle. Picked up the ex-cons around Sacramento getting out of Folsom. Bus engine caught fire at 2 am between Redding and and Eugene. When the other bus picked us up an hour later I looked out at 8 individuals smoking and drinking on the side of the highway wondering if they’d get picked up later. Shortly afterwards, the ride got really interesting. 22 hours to Seattle became 30. Ride Greyhound long distance, just once, preferably while in college and you are ok with insanity.

      To the person that said the driver took artistic license below: riding Greyhound on the east coast is an assortment of college kids, and working class sprinkled together. The South and the West are different places. You meet the best, the worst, and sometimes most tragic people on those buses. Mostly, they are just desperate, and uneducated, trying to make it work.

3. My word… That story took an awful lot of “artistic license”

   So I guess this individual didn’t like their Greyhound experience. I’m not terribly surprised. It IS stressful to utilize their service, especially on the east coast, particularly if you’re travelling any further south than Philadelphia.

4. haha, a few years ago i rode the dog from charlotte to asheville,asheville to nashville and nashville to atlanta. i had a very similar experience.

   the employees on greyhound treat their customers like complete sh*t and dont give a sh*t. its appalling, they dont give the slightest damn if you miss your bus. you have to be careful getting off the bus at an announced 10 min layover for fear the driver would just decide to leave early unannounced and leave all their passengers stranded at the gas station with their stuff onboard.

   on my bus out of ashville to nashville, some mysterious liquid was dripping down on some passenger… when the passenger tried to tell the driver, the driver told them he wasnt stopping and to deal with it and then put the barricade up and locked himself inside the clear plastic compartment (literally designed to prevent the driver from being strangled). my bus from charlotte to asheville had a dead bird completely entwined into the windshield wiper, it had clearly been there for weeks and you could see feathers, old dry blood and a bird foot sticking out.

   the bus stations are always located in the sketchiest, most difficult to find, worst locations possible, why would you place a bus station (which can go anywhere) in asheville at a truck rental facility a few miles from downtown on the otherside of a tunnel? the bus station in gastonia, nc was straight out of a third world country complete with upside down plastic buckets outside as seats. who puts the sole chattanooga bus station at its tiny regional airport way on the outskirts of town?

   i listened to many episodes of the kunstlercast on my bus trip. it was the absolute perfect thing to listen to. as jim kunstler talked and i had the perfect visual accompaniment of everything he was discussing by just looking out the window or around inside the bus.

   1. Shortline’s better than Greyhound, but the bus drivers are *still* terrible. One thing about Amtrak, they actually have service.

5. Not much different than flying these days.

   1. :)

   2. Well, not quite, no security inspection.

6. Combine this posting and the next one with evening news about public reaction to latest airline security, and I think I see a market: a national intercity bus line that self-respecting passengers could stand to ride. About like I remember Greyhound used to be several decades ago.

   Private, Government, cooperative or whatever-I wonder what kind of bus service a passenger could buy for the price of an airline ticket, especially if decent food and accommodations were thrown in, and sub-livestock treatment and pornographic body searches left out?

   In other countries, the national railroad system has been known to include bus service. Might be a good way to develop ridership while we’re building the bullet-train system.

   I like the video showing bullet-buses running other traffic off the highway. In countries where they have serious national bus service, you get rides like that.

   Mark Dublin

   1. I have taken intercity buses all over Europe. I took Megabus from London to Amsterdam and had a pretty similar experience as Don. It was horrible. Then again I look an intercity bus for part of a trip from Stockholm to Oslo. It was okay but nothing amazing. The best bus system I have taken was in Spain actually. Nice buses great terminals, cheap.

      I would also note that I have had some bad experiences on trains. On a trip from Copenhagen to Stockholm the woman next to me was a mess and smelled horrible. I felt sorry for her and she was respectful but I just couldn’t take it. I ended up sitting in the Bistro car for about half the trip.

      The thing with transit and intercity buses is that they are accessible to everyone in society, and if you have a society with as many problems as our, the system will have them as well. I have been thinking about this a lot and I feel very strongly that if we want to make transit and intercity buses more attractive, transit advocates have to become social advocates.

      1. The intercity buses in Mexico are great. The Primeras have nice wide reclining seats and excellent air conditioning; about the only problem is all the curves in the non-autopistas. If you’re the slightest bit seasick prone it’ll getcha.

         But they’re safe and pretty fast, the terminals are very nice and THEY ARE CHEAP! You get several klicks for your peso (one thin dime).

      2. I think there’s a more subtle explanation than seeing our country as having special problems (not that we don’t). Looking at income, Greyhound is basically a low-pass filter and the average person can afford airplane travel. However, in less wealthy countries train and bus travel are used by a much wider slice of society – simply because air travel is difficult to afford, and because the bus goes far more places.

         Take a look at Turkey. Not the poorest country in the world, but flights aren’t terribly frequent or even available to most areas and the trains aren’t great. The average person travels by bus between cities and towns, and each town has a bus station with no fewer than 5 or 6 competing carriers (Istanbul has on the order of 50). You get on a bus there (paying all of $20 or so) and it feels like an airplane. Someone that looks like a flight attendant comes down the aisle and offers you a moist towel packet or hot towel, then offers a tea or Nescafe and a snack cake. The in-drive low-budget Turkish movie begins shortly after, and ends just before you reach your destination (or they run through with the tea and Nescafe again). Nobody misbehaves, and everyone is treated civilly.

      3. Three years ago this fall, my wife and I visited the Nordic countries. Hard to make too many judgments in ten days, but was depressed to see some sights familiar from the States.

         The massive highway and rail bridge from Denmark is in danger of turning Southern Sweden into a suburb of Copenhagen, traffic jams and all. Manufacturing is being off-shored. And you’ll see people aboard transit with the same miseries you see here.

         When I was driving transit, people used to tell me how interesting it must be to see so many different kinds of people- meaning, unfortunately, people with drug addictions and mental illness. The fact is, people in these conditions generally display predictable patterns of behavior, none of them very interesting.

         And none of which other passengers should have to accept as added entertainment on their trip.

         I also note that as European countries achieve a standard of personal and corporate prosperity similar to the US, their politics move similarly to the right. Stockholm’s transit system is privately operated by Veolia.

         Social advocacy? Considering some recent comments in these pages about how transit really isn’t about family wages, I’d put it like this: every decision has its price. Put the right to a huge untaxed income for a few people above the right to a decent wage and good medical care for the average person, and sooner or later it’ll cost you a dangerous transit ride in a puddle of filth.

         A country gets what it’s willing to pay for, along with the consequences of what it isn’t.

         Mark Dublin

      4. “I also note that as European countries achieve a standard of personal and corporate prosperity similar to the US, their politics move similarly to the right”

         While I agree with the rest of what you say, this last bit is not even close to true. I don’t have time to debunk this comprehensively, but suffice it to say that what is considered “right-wing” economically in Europe would be considered “far left wing” here. Start with the fact that they ALL have national universal healthcare, and that tuition at state universities ranges from free to miniscule, and that unions have seats on corporate boards in Germany, and so forth.

         Yeah, they do get more *xenophobic* (immigrant-bashing) as they get richer, but that’s another matter.

         There, the argument is over whether to use private contractors to run state-owned rail systems. Here the argument is over whether we should even have a state-owned rail system, or whether private monopolies should control it completely. It’s just a whole ‘nother ball park.

         I guess basically they started off better, so they have farther to sink.

      5. Transit advocates have to become social advocates? So much for transit eventually becoming a right-wing issue…

   2. This reminds me of a fantasy of mine: starting an intercity bus company I’ll call “Lux Bus”. The features I have in mind that would make it “Lux” include bigger seats and more legroom, similar to Amtrak (probably need a 2-1 configuration to do it), stops in decent parts of town (perhaps using transit centres for easy access to/from local transit), rural stops on request via a toll-free number that one can call up to the time the driver leaves the last major stop (Greyhound dropped the ball by abolishing many small town stops; making them “request only” would have provided the same efficiency without leaving rural populations in the cold), rest/meal stops at a variety of places, not just McDonald’s (maybe even a sit-down place like Denny’s for dinner), and showers and other airport-type amenities at a few big-city stations. I believe a bus company that operated like this could charge almost Amtrak-style prices and make a good profit.

      1. Don’t call it Lux Bus. There’s a company out of Anaheim that basically offers the service you want to start from there to Las Vegas.

      2. Nope. It’s been tried. By Greyhound, no less.

         The only reason the current bus operators make a profit is that they have absolutely cut out all capital expenditures on station facilities. :-P

         So, well, if you could get the big cities to provide you with your big-city station facilities *for free*, you have yourself a business model. Otherwise not.

   3. Right here in the good ‘ole US of A, our national rail system includes substantial bus service. They’re called Amtrak Thruway, and while some are operated by Greyhound, many are provided by private carriers like charter bus companies and airport shuttles.

      In California, the Thruway system links the train lines to all sorts of places they’ll never go.

      1. I though Thruway was contracted exclusively though Trailways. Maybe that’s just in the PNW?

      2. Amtrak contracts with different bus companies based on their needs.

         To supplement the Seattle-VancouverBC train service, they contract with the Canadian firm Cantrail, (they can’t stop in the states, except for KSS). For in state service, they use Northwest Trailways.

         Generally as fill-in service.

         That is, the Seattle Vancouver run is a mid-day bus, and the Seattle-Spokane run is opposite times of the Empire Builder (roughly).

         If they had a Third Vancouver train, mid-day for instance, then they’d probably drop reservations for the Trailways bus.

         And in my dreams, (and many other’s), an eastbound morning train, evening return Seattle-Spokane-Seattle, would fit the bill nicely.

         Bring back the Cascadian!

         In California, the Thruway Bus is Amtrak California
         http://www.amtrakcalifornia.com/index.cfm/about-amtrak-california/

      3. Actually, there is more than just a mid-day Seattle-Vancouver bus, but when the second train began going over the border, they adjusted the bus schedule to compensate.

7. My son takes Greyhound regularly between Seattle and Bellingham. Public transit from Bellingham to Bellevue is great if you can leave early enough and it’s a weekday. He’s taken the train back to Bellingham once. Really enjoyed it; it’s the deluxe ride. On suggestion he use it more… “Why? It cost’s a lot more takes longer and has a more restrictive schedule. There’s a reason you get more “real people” on the bus; it’s real. Cascades is better than most Amtrak service but it’s still a fantasy. It costs too much and it still loses money. Even on a corridor where it could/should work the uber efficient train still can’t compete… Que the sad song about how Greyhound, using mostly Interstates (gas tax) is subsidized (excise tax, fuel tax, corporate tax, etc.). If Amtrak paid zero, nada to the railroads for use of the track would they then be profitable?

   1. “If Amtrak paid zero, nada to the railroads for use of the track would they then be profitable?”

      Yes, in a word.

      Probably about as profitable as Greyhound, though (i.e. barely).

      1. I’m not so sure about that. The 2010 budget (pg. 12) shows a loss of just over a billion dollars. It’s not entirely clear which pigeon hole the trackage fees fall under but I’m guessing “Train Operations” which totals only $246 million. A telling statistic on page 4:

         [Amtrak] operates more than 300 trains per day over more
         than 40 routes, carrying an average of 74,000 passengers daily. Amtrak has just fewer than 20,000
         employees

         That’s an acceptable ratio if you’re running a rickshaw company but as the saying goes, “that’s no way to run a railroad.” Anybody know what the daily ridership to employee ratio (including contract labor) is for Sounder? I think daily ridership is around 10,000; I’m pretty sure it doesn’t require 2,500 employees.

      2. The Cascades had a farebox recovery of around 60% last year. This year their revenues are up substantially, nearly 50% in Q2, so it’s not inconceivable that the Cascades could turn a profit in the near future when the travel time is down around 2:30. The quicker trips will reduce their operating costs and should attract substantial new business.

      3. “[Amtrak] operates more than 300 trains per day over more
         than 40 routes, carrying an average of 74,000 passengers daily. Amtrak has just fewer than 20,000
         employees”

         Wow, that’s a pretty bad ratio. No wonder Amtrak can’t turn a profit. The Swiss National Railways has 27,000 employees. They run 9,000 trains per day, passenger and freight, and move over 325 million passengers per year. Of course they don’t have the long-haul routes like Amtrak does, which probably contribute heavily to Amtrak’s bloated payroll.

      4. “Wow, that’s a pretty bad ratio. No wonder Amtrak can’t turn a profit. The Swiss National Railways has 27,000 employees. They run 9,000 trains per day, passenger and freight, and move over 325 million passengers per year. Of course they don’t have the long-haul routes like Amtrak does, which probably contribute heavily to Amtrak’s bloated payroll.”

         Wait, you’d need to separate Swiss National Railways’ freight from its passenger operations to see what the comparative ratio is.

         Although, you are correct, long-distance trains have a higher employee to passenger ratio, with wait staff, car attendants, Red Cap service, baggage service. etc.

         Also, Amtrak provides a different type of service than commuter agencies, which tend to be somewhat understaffed (on a customer service level).

         You could consider Amtrak’s payroll ‘bloated’ in comparison to the number of trains operating, especially in the rural parts of the country.

         But that could be addressed with more trains.

      5. If you look at the report, on page 9 they list the 2nd Vancouver train as posting a $34 million dollar profit ($ and dollar.. is that repetitively redundant?). I don’t pretend to know the accounting tricks involved but it seems that Cascade and the service to Vancouver actually makes sense. Too bad it’s engulfed in the federal Amtrak pork barrel.

      6. “Wait, you’d need to separate Swiss National Railways’ freight from its passenger operations to see what the comparative ratio is.”

         OK. The passenger division has ~13,000 employees and operates 6700 trains carrying ~1 million passengers per day. If you allocate 2/3 of the infrastructure division employees to passenger services the number comes up to ~19,000 employees. So they operate 22 times as many trains with roughly the same number of employees. But like I said, the comparison isn’t really apples-to-apples, the Swiss passenger network only covers 3000km versus Amtrak’s 34,000km, it’s just that the SBB is the only other nationalized passenger railway that I’m familiar with. Maybe Via Rail would be informative to look at, they’re similar to Amtrak in that they run long-distance trains along with some commuter service, and have long suffered under a hostile government.

      7. Well, there is all kinds of weirdness in Amtrak accounting, and it is true that people have been trying to straighten it out for years.

         Amtrak had for many years been paying for the pensions of pretty much every passenger railroad worker from prior to the foundation of Amtrak, among other oddities. Part of the loss is from high-interest bonds issued during the crazy “Amtrak must become profitable with no funding” era, which I of course wouldn’t really count.

         Also, I am of course referring to operating costs only. :-P Amtrak spends a very large amount of money on maintaining and upgrading the left-to-decay-by-Penn-Central tracks in the Northeast Corridor. If we’re going to compare to a bus company we have to exclude that.

         Once you exclude track costs in exactly the way that bus companies exclude road costs, you begin to realize that Amtrak actually would be profitable. Doing the accounting is a pain though.

         It is also true that Amtrak has too many employees in some areas. Part of that is, *again*, inherited — when you get all the employees for a much larger train network, and then have a much smaller train network, you have a problem.

         One of Amtrak’s problems is inability to spread out the large centralized costs over sufficiently many trains. I will concede that if Amtrak is repeatedly prohibited from expanding, it might never be able to make a profit, because it will not be able to spread those centralized costs out. It’s expensive to have to have a crew base at, say, Albuqeurque for one train each way each day; adding additional trains doesn’t add any station or crew base costs, though.

   2. That about sums up my reasons for driving recently to Portland. Amtrak would have been a wonderfully relaxing ride, with easy connection to light rail direct to my hotel… BUT at $91 round trip for a ticket when I wanted to book, I could drive myself from West Seattle in the same amount of time or less, have access to better food options along the way, return back to Seattle at a more convenient time and only pay ~$37 for a tank of gas plus $27 for parking at the hotel and not moving the car the entire four days I was there. (I rode light rail within the ride free zone the whole time.)

      1. Yep, driving costs are only gas… Love that type of accounting.

      2. If you have to rent a car then driving isn’t such a great bargain.

      3. You most certainly are causing wear-and-tear on your car to the tune of more than $27. Heck, the tires alone. The windshield wipers.

         Of course, if you can’t get to King Street Station from West Seattle at the right time without paying parking fees, it changes the computation for the price of the train.

8. I’d rather put up with lousy Greyhound or Amtrak then let the tsa touch my private areas (or take a porno-picture of me). And Greyhound is a real pain because of my wheelchair

   http://www.greyhound.com/en/ticketsandtravel/disabledtravelers.aspx makes it seem so painless, but it’s not

9. Oh, the experience and stories were definitely worth a return trip on the Dawg. I’ve never been entertained so much during travels. I took Amtrak the following week to a conference in Richmond, VA and sat next to a Duke University alum. Blah.

   From this, I now that the opinion that the way to get more people on Greyhound and Amtrak would be to purchase return tickets for ex-cons on the airlines instead of intercity surface transportation.

10. Bolt Bus (a greyhound subsidiary) and Megabus are the choice bus companies between Boston and DC as well as Upstate NY and Toronto. Nice buses with Wifi, frequent service and low prices. Bolt also takes bikes without a fee.

    1. If the Megabus driver doesn’t shear your head off by stupidly driving under a bridge which is too low….

       I do prefer transportation operators who hire competent drivers.

11. Then theres the regularly scheduled Hampton Jitney that shatters the myth that the rich dont ride buses.

12. Greyhound service goes up and down but I’ve never seen a driver as high-strung as this. I’ve ridden a dozen or so times to California, at least three times to NYC and DC, and once from NYC to Atlanta and back, as well as local trips to Spokane, Missoula, Vancouver BC and Portland. Usually I get an Ameripass for cross-country trips in case my plans change en route. Sometimes the drivers are friendly and talkative, sometimes strict, and their policies for reboarding passes change all the time. But I’ve never seen a driver get mad at somebody over their carry-ons, or seen the driver or staff get impatient with passengers when the bus is late.

    Yes, there are smells and loud people at times, but other times there aren’t. If you ride Greyhound frequently you get used to their general policies such as crossing the Canadian boarder, and you just do the most efficient thing for yourself and expect problems to happen, and then you’re pleasantly surprised when they don’t.

    But Amtrak has gotten significantly better the past ten years, so now I ride it when I can, except the northeast corridor where it’s overpriced. I rode the Coast Starlight once and then didn’t for twenty years because it “runs once a day, is more expensive than flying and slower than a bus”. But I had a superior Empire Builder trip exactly one year ago: reasonably priced, last-minute availability (because it was the low-travel season), comfortable seats, good food, arrived a half-hour early. I hear the Coast Starlight is similarly improved although not up to that level.

    There’s a persistent class difference between Greyhound riders and Amtrak riders even when both go to the same place at roughly the same price. Businessmen and high-class travellers ride Amtrak, working-class people ride Greyhound, and students ride both. You frequently meet truck drivers on Greyhound who are riding from a job several states away from home. I don’t know why this class difference persists when you can get a much better seat for about the same price on Amtrak (sometimes); maybe it’s similar to the Rainier Valley opposition to Link. It’s like working-class people are so used to cars and buses that they don’t even look at Amtrak’s offerings, or they feel it’s not for them or something; I don’t know what.

    1. I think rail travel has been out of the common culture for almost a generation now (with the introduction of the government subsidized highway system), so I think it’s somewhat mysterious for people (in the western US).

       1. @Jim – TWO generations, since the 1960s – few under the age of 60 will have trains operated by the private railways.

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