greyhound: a worthwhile experience, almost.

Dear Greyhound,

On February 7, 2014, I rode a Greyhound from La Grande, OR to Boise, ID.  The departure time was scheduled for 4:30AM.  At 7:00AM, the bus arrived.  The fact that it was late was completely understandable given the weather conditions in the region.  The driver was very courteous and safe, a pleasant person to have driving the bus.  All things considered, it was a pleasurable experience and I might actually be inclined to take the bus again someday.

There was one glaring concern resulting from my phone call to the main office to enquire about the status of the bus. The customer service agent herself was also courteous and professional. My concern though is why a passenger cannot be informed about the status of a particular bus. I was told that the only staffed office for that route was Portland and that they would open at 6:00AM and that I could call them after that time to enquire about whether the bus had departed on schedule. Such basic information from a bus station 200 or 300 miles away is of very little value.  Moreover, such information would be appropriate if this were 1964 instead of 2014.

Consider the ease of technology these days:

-          For a flight, the airplane and the airline can provide exact times of arrival and show the coordinates of where the plane is in the sky at any given moment as it travels.

-          If police want to find me at any given moment, they can track me based on the location of my cell phone. Any person can do similar tracking through simple computer programs.

-          Ten years ago, trains in Europe had each stop equipped with a board and timer that showed to the minute and second when the next train would arrive. Bus stops in Portland have similar features now.

With these, and more systems like them, it is absolutely unthinkable that Greyhound would not be able to know where any given bus is at a particular moment.  There is no good reason why each bus stop cannot have an electronic board with continually updated information.  At the very least, a phone hotline should have been in place 20 years ago for people to be able to call in and give the route number to find out an approximate time of arrival. With the fares Greyhound charges, I don’t think it’s too much to ask to provide ticket holders with this convenience of some sort of tracking system. 

We often have to wait in freezing weather, depending on the bus stop in a town.  It only makes sense that we should know when the bus will arrive.  In fact, the lack of Greyhound’s ability to track busses is somewhat disconcerting.  When traveling through snowy and icy mountain passes, it does not make me feel safe to imagine what could happen if the bus were to slide off the road and down an embankment somewhere people might not have access to call out.  How would you be able to find the bus before people had hypothermia or bled to death, for example?

Please do something to rectify this situation.  Then, I should feel somewhat comfortable riding your bus and likely to use what appears to be an otherwise greatly improved service. 

Thank You, 

daniel yoshida,

La Grande, OR