East Coat Bus Travel Alternatives to Greyhound

For those looking to save money or afraid of flying, bus travel seems to be the most logical alternative. After all, you get to see parts of the country on the open road you wouldn¡¦t see from an airplane's altitude or a train's acceleration. Greyhound, driving along America¡¦s highways since 1914, has become the largest inter-city bus service. In terms of competition there is Megabus, a U.K. bus line that was introduced in this country in 2006, but its routes are limited; accommodating those in places between Chicago and Pittsburgh and Kansas City/St. Louis in the Midwest and from central California southward towards Phoenix in the West. There used to be a number of bus lines under the National Trailways Bus System that provided travelers with a selection of schedules, but after Greyhound acquired Continental Trailways, the largest member of the system, in 1987, many of them went out of business. Today you can find some of the surviving lines such as Carolina Trailways operating under Greyhound, which is where my traveling experience went awry. It was only afterwards where I learned from seasoned Greyhound passengers that an alternative existed.

My trip down to Charlotte, North Carolina was pretty uneventful, save for the fact that our driver refused to make his scheduled stops in Baltimore and DC because he was supposed to catch a flight. As a result, we arrived in Richmond, Virginia two hours early for our connection. However, it was on our way back that making so many stops caused such a problem. My friend and I were two passengers too many for an earlier Greyhound bus that was going directly to DC from Charlotte with a brief layover in Richmond. We were asked to wait for the next bus, which turned out to be a Carolina Trailways "local" bus, making stops in Winston-Salem, High Point, Greensboro, Burlington, Durham, Durham-Raleigh Airport and Raleigh. Understanding that we would have to make another connection at Raleigh was not a big deal, as long as we arrived in Richmond in time for the 3:45pm bus to New York.

Greyhound brochure

Credit: K. Vogel

Copyright: K. Vogel