- 27 Dec, 2025 *
If you live in the United States, I highly recommend watching this video from Miles in Transit, which shows him and his girlfriend crossing the entire nation of Canada (well, the western half, because it’s a two-parter) using intercity buses:
I think anyone from the US who has been penniless at any point in their life has had some experience with shitty American intercity buses. If you cannot afford a flight, or cannot afford to rent a car to drive from the airport to your final destination... then in most parts of the US, you won’t be able to do trips in the 100-200 mile range via train. You’re stuck using a variety of extraordinarily shitty intercity bus companies - most notably Greyhound, which has offered a shocking decrease in service quality over the last 30…
- 27 Dec, 2025 *
If you live in the United States, I highly recommend watching this video from Miles in Transit, which shows him and his girlfriend crossing the entire nation of Canada (well, the western half, because it’s a two-parter) using intercity buses:
I think anyone from the US who has been penniless at any point in their life has had some experience with shitty American intercity buses. If you cannot afford a flight, or cannot afford to rent a car to drive from the airport to your final destination... then in most parts of the US, you won’t be able to do trips in the 100-200 mile range via train. You’re stuck using a variety of extraordinarily shitty intercity bus companies - most notably Greyhound, which has offered a shocking decrease in service quality over the last 30 or so years.
I went to college in New England... but outside the "northeast corridor", the US’s best-served transit corridor. So I’d often take an intercity bus to Boston, then use Boston’s more robust transit services to get elsewhere. When I was in my late teens, the bus of choice for a lot of students was the Fung Wah bus, which served the Boston and New York Chinatowns. It was shut down in the mid 2010s over safety issues. I relied more on Greyhound and Peter Pan, which offered pretty normative (meaning: still bad) service at the time.
When I watched the Miles in Transit video about Canadian intercity bus companies, though... damn! They seem significantly better! Sure, some of them still pick him up on a random curb somewhere with no shelter or waiting area... but the service on the buses seems pretty fucking good compared to what I remember from the time I spent heavily reliant on intercity buses in New England. A bus service having properly designed padding is crazy enough on its own. Someone experiencing "good communication" from a bus company is even crazier.
I have been thinking of potentially doing a big Canada Trip at some point in the next few years, and watching this video definitely made me think more serious about Canadian intercity buses than I had previously. One of the first things I quit doing when I got an Office Job and started making Office Job Money was that I quit taking intercity buses.
These transportation companies are so crucial for so many places in the US, and so shitty, that I really do think that state and federal agencies should try to fully replace them with a more robust, tax-funded service. There is a brief discussion in the video above about a (now-defunct) bus service run by the state of Saskatchewan, and when I saw the coverage map, I immediately started thinking again about how amazing it would be for US states to outcompete Greyhound, which sucks ass. I think they can, really. It wouldn’t be hard!!!