Megabus

Who rode this shit before? You like it?

just booked a round trip to ATL for $12, lol.

my thoughts

Pro:

way more reliable than Greyhound (not the highest bar, but stay w/ me)
routes typically arrive on time (within reason, cos you can't control traffic)
if you book far enough in advance, cheaper than fuckin' Greyhound too
drivers are fairly polite
on the FL-ATL route they always take a lunch stop at the same Hardees every time

Con:

A/C seems to always be on full blast regardless of outside temp and driver can't ever seem to do anything about it
Wi-fi never works
fewer number of scheduled trips/day for each route to choose from

wow, they still exist? cool. i kind of forgot about them when it seemed like every month they would have a bus breakdown on the indy-chicago route.

Got the megabus sleeper to london last year. One of the worst experiences of my life. It has bunks and I felt like I was sleeping in a coffin.

I actually woke up with and inflamed face because it was so stressful that I was like grinding my teeth like crazy.

I have taken the Megabus from Minneapolis to Chicago once and from Durham to Washington DC at least five times. I won't pretend that it's especially comfortable or always perfectly punctual but I appreciate the service very much nonetheless.

My funnest Megabus stories:

-Waiting for my bus alongside a bunch of people who've clearly been waiting a lot longer for their bus (to Memphis, I think?). My bus arrives and one of the people waiting asks the driver if he knows when the bus to Memphis will be arriving. He casually lets them know that it's been cancelled. It's like 9 PM.
-Waiting for my bus while people board a bus with a destination different than my own clearly marked on the display. The scheduled departure time for my bus is creeping ever closer and, remembering the poor Memphis-bound folks from before, I ask the driver if he knows when my bus will be arriving. He looks at me like I'm an idiot and informs me that this IS my bus. Again, toooootally different city denoted on the display.
-Got on the bus somewhere weird (Madison, I think?) when it had clearly made a number of stops already and there was only one seat left and which was occupied by some dude's laptop. A dude who made me ask if I could sit in the seat I paid for before doing his surprisingly-adept 'Paul Rudd picking up a lunchtray' impersonation and giving me side-eye and 'tude sighs for the rest of the trip.

It was always varying degrees of a pain in the ass (one among many reasons being that most cities won't let them park within a cerain distance of their transit hubs, which lends some 'where' mystery alongside the ever-present 'when' conundrum) and I made an oath on my nonexistent children that, as long as I can afford to do otherwise, I'll never Megabus again. But it is inarguably a helluva bargain if you have a high tolerance for bullshit.

Oh, one of them burnt up on a highway recently iirc (I believe they're all decommissioned buses from other buslines, and probably for a reason).

OH and there was also the 'what' enigma inasmuch as some of the decommissioned buses are never given any Megabus branding so you're left wondering if this thing that just pulled up is a Megabus or a Greyhound or your ticket to a future of being human trafficked.

obviously experiences are subjective, based on what route you're riding, but I've always had a much worse time with Greyhound. Megabus, my only major complaint on the ORL-ATL route = the aforementioned air conditioning issue.

Greyhound, I've experienced....

-A driver who almost left 15 minutes before the scheduled time, without any of the passengers in our terminal having boarded (cos nobody ever called us to the terminal over the intercom...several of us had to run outside and wave at him as he backed out)
-Buses arriving mega-late frequently happens, or buses fill up and you gotta wait for another one to come
-A driver threatening to "put someone's ass off the bus" because he suspected him of smoking in the restroom (without any evidence)
-A driver screaming at the top of his lungs at two frustrated passengers trying to make sense of the conflicting instructions he and another employee had given, and telling one of the customers to "get the hell out of his line"
-A custodian screaming at me from across the room because I walked on her wet floor that had no wet floor signage around it

and they have gotten hella expensive.

tho our Megabus did almost leave a passenger behind last time cos she left two minutes prior to the time she said she was going to leave. I usually get back 5+ minutes early for that reason, but this poor dude was running after the bus before she saw him and stopped.

tho the worst bus experiences to this day was my high school bus driver growing up. many a day getting thrown forward cos she was napping and didn't notice traffic stopped in front of her while everybody on the bus screamed at her.

Double-decker Megabus = chill times, WiFi, charged phone, no worries.

i love Megabus. only ridden it a handful of times but it was a pretty nice bus with comfy seats and WiFi. sometimes you can get really good deals, once i did round-trip Atlanta to Nashville for under $30.

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!