Leave the driving to anybody but me...

March 2, 1:46 PMNY Underground Travel ExaminerDJ Hazard

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Escape From New York is more than just a Kurt Russell movie. It’s one of almost every New Yorker’s periodic challenge. To massacre an old chestnut, you have to know peace to appreciate war.

Sometimes it’s off to a summer rental or a few days in the woods to try to sleep without the calming reassurance of sirens, meaningless car alarms and the Richter Scale bass line from some idiot’s car at a red light.

Perhaps it’s to another city, be it for business or pleasure, and we politely tolerate the bravado of whatever town we’re in as they valiantly try to convince us they, too, are a metropolis.    

I travel a lot. It’s what I do. It’s how I pay the bills. Until the armored car guy slips on the ice and hits his head and there’s a bag of money sitting right there and now I can afford to live in New York City and just write stories, I guess I’ll continue to travel to pay the bills.

I sold my car a few years ago. I just didn’t want to deal with it while living in the world’s biggest public transportation experiment. Then the gas prices shot to the Moon. Everybody thought I was a prophet. Nope, I just hated looking for parking spaces, getting towed and getting broken into. Go figure.

I do shows out of town two, three, four nights a week. Sometimes at the same place for a whole week or two. If it’s far enough away to make sense, I fly. If it’s closer, I take a bus. It seems like a lot of people go from NYC to Boston every week. So do I, not every week, but often enough. I’m going to use the NYC/Boston bus experience for today’s seminar.

First of all, Amtrak, and especially the higher priced nifty and swanky Acela, is not an option. For the price of a one way ticket, I can get almost three round trip tickets by other means. Maybe I’ll do the train when I hit the lottery. That’s on my ‘to do’ list, right below being in the right place when the armored car guy slips on the ice.

Remember CBGB’s, the legendary underground rock club? You can immortalize its existence by using CBGB as a mnemonic- Chinatown Bolt Greyhound Bus.

The Chinatown Buses:

Their reputations precede them and they’ve been the butt of many a joke, some based in reality, some out of viral gossip.

It all started with the Fung Wah bus (and, yeah, everybody gets it out of their system by singing the Wang Chung song). I got turned on to the Fung Wah around 2000, by an actual Chinese lady when it was still kind of a ancient Chinese secret.

It was only $10 back then (has gone up to $15) and was a small fleet of airport shuttle vans. Mostly happy Chinese folks, traveling from Chinatown NYC to Chinatown Boston, all engaging in all kinds of robust conversations that totally eluded my lack of interpretation. I know there’s the rumors, but  I never saw chickens in cages, okay?

Soon the word was out. Broke college students, amused fashionistas and whoever else began to take the trip. Business was booming. They ramped up the operation to full sized buses and they were being run ragged, I assume, as I know some of the mechanical failure reports were true by personal experience.

Imitation is the sincerest form of stealing somebody’s idea and, soon after, the Lucky Star bus company appeared on the scene. I honestly believe that the healthy competition between the two has set the bar for the quality and maintenance of the buses. Both companies offer competitive pricing and both now offer an extra 2 am bus back to New York (for a higher ransom) on the weekends so that you can get back to your cubicle, no matter how hung over, on Monday.

The down side of the Fung Wah and the Lucky Star is that you might be sharing your ride with, shall I say, ‘inconsiderate’ cell phone users and (especially on overnight runs) many a Rip van Winkle who stretches out across the aisle to sleep on all four seats and blocking the bathroom. From my experience, Fung Wah and Lucky Star drivers really can’t be bothered with that. In the immortal words of Raul Julia in The Gumball Rally, “Whatsa behind me doesn’t matter.”

The Bolt Bus:

When I was in art school, it was rumored that McDonalds had a think tank that was basically a three story high bean bag chair populated with advertising executives who just chilled and thought up crazy stuff.

Ever try to get out of a bean bag chair? It can be done. I imagine it takes a little long to get out of a three story high bean bag chair, but somebody did and mixed the diamond with the pearl.

The Bolt Bus claim to fame is having wifi on board! The bait has been cast and the people who can’t live for five minutes without checking their email have happily chomped on it. I mean, that’s cool. They’re all happily engrossed in their laptops and staying out of trouble. It’s a marketing success and nobody got hurt.

What I personally like about the Bolt Bus is the ticketing system. They have an ABC system that favors you according to how early you book your trip online. When you get the bus, which, by the way, is not at Port Authority but on 34th Street, ‘A’ ticket holders get to board first, followed by ‘B’ and so on.

I do have to say that on two occasions a new driver did not know about the ABC system and, also on two occasions, the wifi didn’t work. I write for a living, so writing to Bolt Bus about these disappointments was no skin off where I occupy a seat and they were very cordial and pledged 100% satisfaction.

Bolt Bus is not much more than Fung Wah and Lucky Star, and actually have some cheaper rates if your departure is flexible.

Greyhound:

Greyhound costs a little more than the others, but they seem to have tried to respond to the competition by dropping their prices somewhat. What I really love about Greyhound are the omnipotent drivers.. They don’t take baloney from anybody. They run a tight ship and they don’t want any lip. In the past year, I’ve seen three unruly passengers kicked off the bus- one before he even got on.

What I have not enjoyed, for the most part, is their new Priority Boarding offer. This is where, for an extra $5, you stand in a separate line and get to board the bus first. On my first three Priority Boarding instances I was totally ignored and the driver let the whole rest of the mob on the bus first. On one specific occasion, when Greyhound was offering specific seat assignment as part of Priority Boarding, my seat was given to a Greyhound employee and I had to make a little scene to show my umbrage and get what I paid for.

I have been in ongoing communication with Greyhound about this and I will state that, to their credit, the last two Priority Boarding occasions went without a hitch. They have also since modified their offer to just getting on the bus first, not reserved seating.       

Out of the four bus companies we’ve talked about today, only three seem to offer any kind of frequent traveler incentives. Fung Wah’s site might have it, but I couldn’t find it. Lucky Star doesn’t seem all that enticing (I signed up). It seems you have to take fifty some odd trips to get a key chain or something. Bolt Bus and Greyhound have some real advantages to signing up. The more you ride, the more you get. Bolt gives a free trip every eight rides and Greyhound ups the ante by also including discounts and companion pass deals.

Bolt Bus and Lucky Star also tout some $1 fare insanity. I hear, with Bolt at least, it's a crap shoot and might happen arbitrarily. It's never happened to me on either bus trip.

I have also found, personally, that the Bolt Bus site works better on IE than Firefox, but that might just be my own humble laptop’s limitations.

Before we conclude today, I would be remiss in not sharing an Extreme Bus travel tip.

You know when the bus looks like it’s going to be half full and everybody’s going to have their own seat to stretch out for the trip? You know when suddenly a couple of stragglers show up and you know they’re going to have to sit with somebody, but please let it not be you?

That’s why I sit in the aisle seat until the bus is underway. I’m not being too antisocial, I’ve just been riding on buses for a long, long time and I think it’s somebody’s else’s turn to be a good neighbor. The last guy on the bus (and hey, he’s lucky he made the bus) is always a little disoriented and will zoom in on the first empty aisle seat he sees and plop down next to you.

Sit against the aisle. Keep your coat on. Be a blowfish. Try to look as big as possible, so that the window seat looks as small as possible. If they don’t end up elsewhere, well that’s the breaks, but that doesn’t mean you have to scoot over for them and be squashed against the window. Just politely get up and let them in, okay? Okay.

In fairness, I have looked into but not taken Megabus and a few others. I have to work in Atlantic City in June and I will be contemplating how to get there. Hey, if I hit the jackpot... never mind. I won’t abandon you, my babies. I’ll just get a better computer.