In my memoir From Brooklyn to Benares and Back, I wrote about a bus ride that I took in 1981. I was on a crowded bus making its way from Katmandu to Janakpur, a town in south Nepal near the Indian border. The bus was packed and the route was a treacherous, slow descent on narrow roads carved on the edge of mountains overlooking ravines and gorges. We made it safely but I still called it the bus ride from hell.

18 years later I took my first bus journey from Athens, Greece to Tirana, the capital of Albania. The bus departed from a chaotic station in Athens where hundreds of people pushed and shoved their way onto the white buses which took scores of emigres back to their home country. I was the only non-Albanian on the bus and the overnight journey, punctuated by a long and also chaotic wait at the Greek-Albanian border, was not fun. It was the bus ride from hell, part 2.

Nepal and Albania are impoverished countries and they can be forgiven if their transportation services are chaotic and uncomfortable. But the USA should not be forgiven for its shoddy transportation system. Most people already know that air travel has become an uncomfortable and unpleasant experience. But the problems suffered by the relatively wealthy air travelers is nothing compared to misery that people undergo if they choose or are forced to travel on long distance buses, usually run by the Greyhound company.
I found out about this last night on a bus ride from Asheville, North Carolina to Champaign, Illinois. It was a return journey. The journey going to Asheville was overnight and I had to wait a long time at the connection point in Cincinnati but I survived it. The return journey was much worse. I rode from Asheville, to Knoxville, Tennessee and the connection was smooth. But when I went from Knoxville to Nashville, I was in for a rude shock. The Nashville terminal was teeming with people and there were no signs or markers or schedules like you find in airports. It reminded me of the departure of the buses for Albania. My incoming bus was a little late and I was worried if my outgoing bus had left or when it would leave or from which entrance it would leave. I needn’t have worried because the bus wouldn’t leave for three more hours. Greyhound didn’t have a driver for the Nashville to Indianapolis leg of the journey. I waited and waited in the crowded waiting area. Occasionally announcements were made by someone shouting out the message without any amplification. There was no information about why our bus was delayed.

Finally, the bus company decided to send the driver who took us from Knoxville to Nashville on the onward journey to Indianapolis. The fatigued driver did her job well and we reached Indianapolis, but my connection to Champaign had left some two hours before. I had another long wait in the Indianapolis bus station. Bus travel is not the best way to travel but it doesn’t have to be as uncomfortable as the Greyhound system is in the US. In Turkey the people ride on sleek intercity buses, which stop at stations that are much more modern than the dilapidated bus terminals in the US. Intercity bus travel in Sweden and other parts of Europe also leave the US in the dust. Even the sleek and comfortable buses that run between Nicaragua and Cost Rica offer a stark comparison to what we have in the US

When international sports events take place, people cheer “USA , USA” and really believe the old slogan that the USA is the number one country in the world. It is a fantasy because this is a country with a decaying infrastructure, a health care system that only serves the super-rich, and an educational system that turns youth into indentured servants struggling for years to repay a mountain of student loans. My journey from Asheville to Champaign took almost 24 hours to complete, and reminded me once again that the USA is a top class country only for those with a lot of money.