Megabus

I had a completely reasonable megabus round trip a few years ago, although the wifi was definitely spotty, although it was always at the same areas that I'd had poor cell phone reception in past years so... kind of understandable

A couple friends were working in Chicago for six months and commuting every other weekend back to their families in Iowa so they took the Megabus regularly. They had a mostly decent experience, except for the time one of them was on the Megabus that got pulled over because their driver was drunk. The replacement driver just wasn't going to happen, so he got a ride to somewhere and pooled cash with a couple other people to rent a car.

NB, I have not Megabussed in a good number of years so it's entirely possible that they've turned things around. I do not remember ever having access to wi-fi, for instance.

I like to imagine the Megabus central office is just a nest of wires and conduit all plugging in to a blinkenlights console with a big reel-to-reel storage installation, whining with fan and chiller noise and freezing cold, posting job ads to craigslist, printing schedules and ticketing on teletype paper falling directly into a wastebin, gradually attaining sentience

― slathered in cream and covered with stickers (silby), Monday, September 19, 2016 12:24 PM (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have Greyhounded across Canada twice and i can't imagine Megabus supplying any worse horrors

megabus used to be pretty nice. back in the day you could occasionally get the $1 ticket if you booked a few weeks in advance, and the $3 or $5 tickets even more frequently.

I mainly used to go back and forth from DC and NYC a few years back, and then for several trips between Chicago and St. Louis the last few months. The NYC pickup area was a nightmare. Several blocks away from everything else on one of the only empty stretches in Manhattan, no shelter from rain or heat or cold. And there'd be several different buses set to arrive or depart at any given time, of course, but all of them were 0 to 45 minutes late and inconsistently labeled. one time you'd make the trip and your bus would say "NYC > Baltimore", but the megabus waiting line person would call out "it's going to DC", quietly, at the last moment, and a bunch of people would whisper to each other "wait, it's going to DC too? after Baltimore? They told me earlier it wasn't!" and a pile onto the bus just before it left. A few months later, same trip, and it says "NYC > DC", and people going to Baltimore hop on the bus only to be told at the last moment that this particular bus was not stopping in Baltimore - yes, the bus that was supposed to take them to Baltimore was in fact scheduled for the same time, but it was running late, however the bus that was scheduled later, NYC direct to DC, no stops in Baltimore, has arrived early, and that's the bus you're sitting on. So get off and wait for the bus that's running late that's going in the same direction!

What the fuck am I talking about? exactly.

It was always like this, and repetition didn't help. Sometimes there'd be a waiting line assistant person on hand to answer questions, sometimes not, but even when they were there they were always absent or on the bus doing something. The NYC/Bmore/DC chaos I mentioned above was multiplied by several different cities and routes at once, so there'd be half a dozen loosely held lines snaking around the pickup area, each engaging in a game of telephone between and among queues.

oh yeah, and the wi-fi never works! fuck you megabus!

i mentioned this recently in another ilx thread that talked about megabus, but my groundbreaking venture capitalist gamechanging disruption plan for megabus is to spend $15 an hour more at each location and have a person who organizes the lines and proactively tells everyone where to stand for their upcoming bus journey. they appear to have already piloted this crazy idea but it crashed and the waiting line employees are in open rebellion against the company, the bus riding civilians, and the concepts of order and conduct in general

xpost Now that sounds like the Megabus I know and loathe!

I think I took Boltbus for a Boston roundtrip last summer? I don't even know for sure. Their return route was real weird, we went into Queens before ending up in thecanyons of the West 30s (as described by KM above).

tho the worst bus experiences to this day was my high school bus driver growing up

have had more nightmarish uk megabus journeys than i can remember. the recent occasion that comes to mind was the glasgow-london route that started off okay as i spent the first couple of hours reading, then it got dark out, and the lights didn't work, and the socket next to my seat didn't work, so the remaining eight hours of the journey consisted in staring into darkness reflecting on the horrors of life.

probably beaten by the time the last bus of the night, in january, at an unsheltered stop, just didn't turn up tho.

I got one of the elusive $1 fares today!

too bad on the way back it was $33 :/. and today was the first day the date was released for sale too.

I got the elusive $1 fare both days. $4 roundtrip with fees.

and then, forgot somehow that I was out of my anxiety meds and needed to pick them up for two consecutive days for my bus trip leaving at 7:30 am.

rather than deal with the rigmarole of getting CVS to move the prescription to a pharmacy in Atlanta and me figuring out how to get to it, while also being without pills for almost an entire day, paid to change trips so I wound up spending $35. meh.

but I am on the bus right now. not using the Wifi cos it sucks. tether baby!