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Comment by friend_and_foe | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what it was like 30 years ago. I would guess some of the same people rode these busses? Were they always like this? I assume the mad dash for the door to have a smoke has been around about as long as restrictions on smoking, before that the bus would've been unbearable to a non smoker.

What I really wonder about this all: was america always like this but people were just more OK rubbing shoulders with each other's filth and sweat in those days, or are these people hollowed out, dying versions of the Americans of yesteryear? What's changed: our willingness to tolerate the greasy, sweaty animals that we are and that surround us, or the health of our society?

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I took some trips on Greyhound through the West and Midwest in the 1980s. Stations and buses were clean, quiet, and orderly. No homeless or people with obvious issues. It was pretty much like the experience of taking a commuter flight today. I started hearing bad things about traveling Greyhound in the 1990s but I don't know what caused things to change.

I've heard the Greyhound level of service plummeted after they acquired their competitor Trailways, but that was before my time so can't comment first-hand.

That + plummeting prices of air travel due to deregulation likely gutted the industry profits, which led to less reinvestment in their capital assets, which led to poorer experience, GOTO 20.

There's a famous family story where my grandmother kicked my 14 year old uncle out of the car for being an asshole (I'd imagine that he was) on a family road trip. This would probably have been the mid 70's. She got him a bus ticket and then forced my mother (recently gotten her learner's permit) to drive off without him. When he came back he said he had a good trip with the "winos" on the bus, so I always thought it had a reputation even back then as being a bit rough, but I suppose good enough to send a teenager on.

The problem never was that you’re rubbing shoulders with the “poors”. The problem is mentally unstable people and drug addicts. Formerly there were far fewer hard drug addicts and the insane got shipped off to asylums (which we don’t have anymore).

I hear you, I'm also careful to make the distinction between poor and antisocial. However, you must also acknowledge that extremely poor people have less at stake, and so it's not surprise that the two are correlated.

There was more of a sense of community in those days, for good and for bad. People cared about their neighbours, but the flipside of that was a willingness to exclude the antisocial from society entirely. The article mentions racial segregation which is one prominent case, but more generally, 30 years ago if there had been a junkie or someone who stank or what have you on the bus, the driver would've thrown them off and the "decent" passengers would've supported them in doing so, and conversely if someone who seemed respectable had mislaid their ticket then that same driver would've been more understanding.

This could probably be debated for hours, and I’m not firm on this belief (curious to hear what others think) but I believe Reagan contributed to this decline with the deinstitutionalization of mental health.

With the slow ascent of wealth inequality causing more people to feel financial strain, people at the bottom who mentally break no longer have a means to get mental health care.

(These days it is incredibly hard to get mental health care in the USA regardless of your financial status, IMO.)

There was bipartisan support for what Reagan did. You have to remember that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a hit in the mid 70s and there was a massive bipartisan support for the idea that institutionalization was infringing on rights. And to be fair, Mental Institutions in that era were horrendous. So this was an easy bipartisan win for politicians in the 70s and 80s.

Yeah, I can imagine it seemed like a good idea at the time. But it probably could have been done differently and I definitely think it should be fixed now!

That's why you're seeing more discourse about this in 2023. The pendulum is beginning to swing in the opposite direction, but it will take at least 10-15 years to see any impact.

I think youre right. Unfortunately, once the issue of, particularly homeless, severely mentally ill people is out of sight (i.e. no longer on the streets), it will be very easy for the issue to be forgotten by the masses. And it would be a huge cost center, since many of the patients would likely not have large quantities of savings, so no good material incentives to do it well either. It would be dangerously easy to fall right back into the terrible asylums of the past.

Other forms of transportation are (relatively) cheaper and faster so only those absolutely forced to remain on the bus.

Amtrak is not allowed to sell bus-only tickets because those busses are much nicer than Greyhound.

When everyone with a job could afford a car public transportation became the refuge of the lowest society has to offer: homeless and students.

But then in the 1990s traffic became so bad that everyone in European and Asian cities was forced back into the trains and subways. This never happened in the US because its too rural.

Pretty much anything that's widely available to the masses suffers from the introduction of a higher price for better experience competitor. It's a matter of distillation; People who can afford the better experience will pay extra for it, leaving only those without other options using the original service.

In the case of greyhounds, the competitor was air travel. Before the rise of discount airlines, flying was prohibitively expensive for a good portion of society. Now, oftentimes the only people who take longhaul busses are people who are either unable, or unwilling, to pay an extra ~50-100 bucks to save themselves several hours.

The upper classes weren't riding Greyhound fifty or sixty years ago. College students would, yes. Some college students would book a $130 one-month pass and travel a lot. But in general, would you prefer to fly from one coast to another or spend three days on a bus? You have to remember that airfare was relatively more expensive then.

I never saw people standing in the aisles except once when the Midwest was fogged in and people were desperate to get home for Christmas. In those days I would stand in the back of the line, knowing that if the bus filled up, five or ten of us might get another bus all to ourselves.

I'd guess that these days, the upper bracket of clientele are travelling in other ways (flying, own car, car hire, etc), people now are more rushed, and processes/businesses are optimised to eke out a profit or make for a predictable schedule. Combines to create a rushed and ruthless atmosphere full of people already feeling under pressure.

it's just that mostly, nobody takes a Greyhound bus if they have another option, you'd rent a car or fly.

there are intercity bus routes in New York/New England that have a mix of all kinds of people. but I think this is sustained both by having students travel home, and by the buses being the only non-car route to some vacation spots.

> I wonder what it was like 30 years ago.

Aside from "people were watching movies or playing games on their phone", it was the same.

Yes it was the same 30 years ago.

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