Sunday Morning Greyhound

The Boston-NYC trip is one that I have traveled many times. Both when I interned and subsequently moved to New York, I would take either the then nascent Fung Wah (or rival Lucky Star) Chinatown bus, which was priced at $15 originally, and then after what we deemed to be a "SARS discount", was knocked down to $10. Greyhound used to be about $35 each way, but slowly to compete with those ever resourceful Chinese knocked their price down to where it now stands at about $25 roundtrip.

Now, as money became a little less tight over the years, for some reason the economist in me has still taken the bus. This decision rather surprises many who easily would shell out the extra cash rather than enter that horrible, dingy basement of Port Authority. However to me, the price differential with the $180 Amtrak roundtrip just doesn't make sense. The difference in time is maybe 20-30 minutes barring obscene traffic (Thanksgiving Wednesday or other holidays I'll take the train). The quality difference is not small; Amtrak you get AC outlets for electronic devices, leg room, and most important, a sterility in the environment that does not exist in the bus. But as my mind works in a constant calculations of price and utility, the nearly 500% price increase isn't properly compensated. For some reason spending $100 on a bar tab or new electronic gadget makes all the sense in the world, but four cramped hours apparently does not rate high in my guns and butter graph.

Now, all this said, sometimes the Greyhound service and experience can still serve to shock and awe (ever since I've lived on the west side, Port Authority is super accessible and a cab ride to chinatown would cost more than the bus itself, so Greyhound it is). Planning to come home for a few days, I headed to Port Authority at about 9:45am on Sunday morning. Normally that would be fine for the 10am bus. I was one of the first 10 people in line so felt confident I should be departing soon. No 10am bus as scheduled. No 10:30am bus. No 11am bus. The line slowly morphed into more of a crowd. The beauty of Greyhound is they know they got you by the balls. You are taking the bus to ride the absolute cheapest possible option. They know that either you stick with the bus, or you're just not going.

Amazingly, as people got more and more angered, there was still no communication from anyone (The Chinatown buses function with a similar lack of customer service, but I always just assumed "they don't speak English"). Finally after a near riot in the basement of Port Authority and people swearing in about 30 different languages, the bus finally arrived at about 12:45pm. I finally managed to get on after three hours of sitting in a crowd at Port Authority, just in time to sit on a bus for five hours. I guess in my cost-benefit comparative analysis, I should also begin to include the money it will take to get drunk to forget about the whole experience. And yes, all the people below are waiting to go to Boston....