is it gonna go my way?

It doesn't take much effort to find a bad opinion of any company online.  There's always someone willing to dish about their negative experience in a public format.  Yelp seems to be a good place for these types of reviews.  And as I’ve said in the past, those opinions are worth looking at but also worth the consideration that one bad review does not a bad company make. 

(And we all know that people won't/don't/can't be bothered to give good reviews), so.

Having said that, and in the same breathe, it's pretty safe to say that as a company you can probably do 'OK' when servicing the bulk of the public, but it takes some special talent to blow it when it comes to people who are marginalized by special needs.  And I will come back to this point.  I promise.

But first let's talk about a growing trend in the lack of car ownership, in which we also need to talk about intercity mass transit - and when I say talk, but I mean bemoan the lack of decent options.  You can rent a car, or do car share, but that can be pricey and if you're heading out of town to stay with a friend you have to deal with parking.  Also forget getting either a car or a deal during the holidays, my experience is that the 'deal' is you get the pay extra for those dates.  You can use some sort of mass transit, such as VIA; which is expensive and have a laughable schedule unless you are going to Montreal or Toronto; GO, which is great during the week but forget the weekends; and lastly Greyhound (and I'm going to lump other bus lines in here) the final bastion of low cost mass transit and they know it.

Here's the deal.  Greyhound is as non-customer centric as you can get.  They're in the business of selling you a ticket and running a bus from point A to B.  It's up to you to figure out how to buy the ticket, how to get on the correct bus, make certain your luggage and you get on and off the bus and if there's an issue, you're just going to have to suck it up.  Having said that it costs me about $20 to go back and forth to Kitchener on a given weekend and generally, the price is the same no matter what - assuming you buy it ahead of time and pay a little extra for the convenience of printing your own ticket.

We've all seen the news.  Megabus (who is not Greyhound) runs into bridge, into another bridge, starts on fire. Mentally unstable man (on Greyhound) had a psychotic break and it's really, really bad. But the article that caught my eye was the one about a girl, confined to a wheelchair, essentially dumped in a snow bank on a cold day, for no reason that made sense, and in response, Greyhound states "We pride ourselves on stellar customer service and a stellar travel experience."

As a long time customer of Greyhound's my only response to that is 'whathPHFFF".  And I’m not just talking about this particular individual, who really got the short end of the stick on this one.  I’m talking in general. See and then after they decided that maybe they could do better than ‘stellar’.

I'll soften this rant a little by stating that, for the most part, I’ve never taken issue with the drivers' themselves.  I use this service on average about 10 times a year and have for the bulk of my adult life, so I’m eventually gonna run into a dufas or two.  But as a company the service is laughable.

During the December ice storm that hit Ontario, I got up on a day I was planning to travel to a birthday party for my niece.  Airlines, trains, TTC and even CAA were filing news posts, twitter and updates to their own websites.  Greyhound 'cannot foresee delays by weather'.

While the TTC updates by the second, Greyhound has little to say.

So what do we do?  Take the train - which I would love to but at twice the price and a schedule that returns me to Toronto after 11 p.m. on a Sunday night (from Kitchener) this is not an option. So we stick with the reliable and annoying Greyhound until another low cost option presents itself.  In the meantime I'll continue to rile Greyhound on Twitter if only to amuse myself and feel some sort of satisfaction that I said something.  And since we all seem to be voting about something this year, why not talk about intercity transport options.  We're a big country but in places we're not. Like southern Ontario, where a few hours between cities should allow options for travel that are reliable, affordable and decent.

I mean, have you ever tried to pee on one of those things?