So I booked on Greyhound to cross the country. Boarded in Flagstaff, Arizona at 8:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, to arrive in Washington D.C. at 3:50 a.m. on a Friday. Packed a bunch of books and a Nook reader, and brought along a lot of food (though none of Mrs. Wagner's pies), some bottles of tea and a gallon of water.
Downsides
For reasons which escape me, but probably reflect the short-sighted perspectives of the company's bean-counters, Greyhound seems committed to emulating the airlines' seating innovations. As in, ya gotta love your knees. And your neighbor's breadth. I rode on two different designs of buses. The older had a lot more leg room than the newer; the difference was between reasonable comfort and acute pain. At 6'1" I'm taller than most, but shorter than many; I cannot imagine how somebody half a foot taller than me can cope (but, of course, that's true on airliners too, although the agony there is admittedly of far shorter duration). The seat backs on the older model also reclined more, and it seemed to have slightly wider seats. (One little mystery: both types had useless little footrests whose only function seemed to be preventing one from sticking cramped feet into the space beneath the seat ahead.)
The company needs to focus on their customers' needs a lot more attentively. Airports and train stations routinely have informative displays giving arrival and departure times, gates and on-time status. Not so at Greyhound terminals. Nor do they have circulating staff enlightening confused travelers. Result? Crowds of confused passengers milling about, hearing rumors, wondering what's going on, alternating between anger and resignation. Aggravating the problem, many drivers ignore the PA microphone at their elbows, preferring to make important announcements in conversational voices totally unintelligible to passengers rearward of the front few rows.
For a little extra credit, Greyhound could even arrange to have spare drivers and buses available to quickly respond to breakdowns occurring out on the road. I did not particularly appreciate standing on the side of Interstate 376 just outside of Pittsburgh for an hour and a half while our bus leaked coolant into a ditch along the shoulder as semi-trailers roared by scant inches to our left.
My bus arrived too late to make connections in both St. Louis and Pittsburgh. Well, that's a bit of a mis-statement; we arrived in St. Louis three minutes before my connection was due to depart ... but there were 120 ticket-holding passengers trying to board a bus seating just 46. Meaning I couldn't board that bus - first-come, first-served, after all - or the next, so I didn't board a bus bound for my next connection until four hours later. In this day of computerized ticketing, it is impossible to comprehend how that happened. I understand the concept of over-booking, but by a factor of three? Not too surprising, therefore, but after that I missed my connection in Pittsburgh, too ... and then came the joy of the roadside breakdown. Needless to say, I arrived in Washington long after I should have.
Upsides
It's cheap. Far less than airlines, much less than Amtrak. Less than one's own car, too, if one is realistic with assumptions about cost. There's simply no other way to travel long distances for as little. My complaining aside, Greyhound does the job pretty well; at their worst, the buses were reasonably tolerable; the air conditioning always worked; we did arrive where we were heading, and we arrived there safely.
Most important, Greyhound serves a very real need. The proof was in the occupancy: all of the buses I saw were full, or nearly so.
It does that in part by serving a lot of little towns - especially in the west and on the Prairie - that aren't served by any other form of long-distance public conveyance. (I found the same thing to be true of Amtrak even in California, where the train serves as a valuable conduit between the small towns of that state's central coast.)
More than that, the bus offers affordable interstate travel to people who could not afford it otherwise. I've traveled a fair amount by air and train, and the folks on these buses come from a distinctly different public. It's a pretty varied population, but I got the sense that most were employed somewhere but worked near the bottom of the ladder ... or, if not, were riding their hopes to someplace where they might find work. Among my fellow travelers, I met a very personable, generous young truck-driver heading home to Pittsburgh from Phoenix for his first vacation since starting his career. There was a middle-aged couple who obviously fit together like an old pair of gloves, with lots of unspoken tenderness for each other but probably not much money, traveling from Arizona to New York. There were a bunch of early-twenties, bound for distances short and long. No gabardine suits. Or spies, that I could tell. In the west, the ethnic mix was pretty varied, but further east the west's Hispanics seemed to be replaced by African Americans. A substantial proportion of whites the whole way. Always, though, it was quite a mix ethnically. But apparently not economically; these seemed to be people with the same need or urge to travel as their more affluent fellows, but without the means to use the same (more convenient) modalities, so the bus is the only way I suspect they can meet those needs and wishes. To me, that seems pretty important.
Recommendations to Greyhound:
Treat travelers as customers, not cattle. Emulate Amtrak's practice of providing comfortable amounts of space to compensate for the lengthy time the passenger must spend there. It wouldn't take much - maybe remove one row of seats and boost prices by a compensating 8% if need be - traveling with the running dog would be a lot more comfortable yet still a bargain.
Provide riders with the same sorts of information airlines and railroads routinely offer. The desk clerks have schedule and boarding information at their finger-tips, so it wouldn't be difficult to devise a system of monitors dispersed around the terminal to display it to the traveling public.
The company (and Amtrak, for that matter) could take another page out of the airlines' book (excepting Southwest) by giving folks an opportunity to select seats when they purchase tickets. That shouldn't be difficult; obviously the necessary software has been around for a while.
Greyhound could also teach drivers to use their PA system effectively. Some do, but others don't, and that suggests the problem is one of training. Easy to correct.
Occupations of the bored
No matter how good or how bad the service and accommodations, bus travel means sitting in one place for a long time. Anticipating that obvious condition, I brought a small library of books, both hardcopy and electronic. I was surprised to see that I was pretty much the only reader ... and after the lights went down at night, the only reader. A lot of passengers had smart phones and small electronic game players. A few had laptops. Some were quietly listening to their MP3 players. But nobody seemed to be reading. Maybe that has something to do with class, or its handmaiden, education; I don't know, nor do I much care. The key was that just about everybody brought along something to while away the hours.
1. The drivers don't seem to care what size bag of groceries one brings, so I could have - should have - brought a bigger, stronger bag for provisions. And chosen a better, more interesting supply of food.
2. Wish I brought a pillow. A must: the seat backs just aren't formed quite right, and the window glass vibrates too much. Need that pillow.
3. Load more books on the Nook. Easier to carry than a paper library, and the only way to read at night. And trust me: the nights can get long.
The future?
Yes, I would travel by Greyhound again. It is cheap, and it does provide a different view of America than air and rail travelers see. But don't plan on getting there quickly or all that comfortably.
Beyond that, I would like to try the new bus lines serving some of the denser corridors, like MegaBus.
