I was just in Jena and decided to take a bus to Leipzig. The bus was like riding in a plush pillow, the driver even made coffee for everyone with a machine that was built into the actual bus.
Going back to Germany in a few hours to relive the experience.
Is it really any worse than the cattle-car experience of air travel in the US? I take the bus semi-regularly and while far from luxury, I don't find it any less appalling than what Alaska / United / et al. dish out.
I literally settled yesterday for a far too small amount with Turkish Airlines, because my bag got "lost" four weeks ago (Frankfurt-Istanbul-Singapore).
So .. yeah. I'm convinced it was stolen. And the airlines treat you like crap when that happens, basically shrug and do nothing for a month.
I was also a frequent Greyhound rider, mostly during and right after college (2000 - 2007 maybe). It was overall an awful experience, and in general took about 3x the time of driving a car. You do end up with about one crazy story per 8 hours travelled though.
Smoke breaks. I think a near majority of Greyhound riders smoke. And dang, Germans and French smoke way more than Americans - it's almost like they don't know or care that it'll kill you, and make you cough badly enough it sounds like you're dying. Somehow I kinda doubt it'll be any faster on a FlixBus.
If you aren't choosing your bus line based on "what's the cheapest one that is at least as clean as any other form of public transportation" you are an out-lier compared to the typical customer.
I travelled with Flixbus multiple times when the sector was still booming about two years ago. I don't understand the complains. Flixbus has comfortable seats, you can charge your phone and they have very fair prices for snacks and drinks. Of course, you do not have infinite space if you have long legs (but more than in a common bus) and the Wifi could be laggy sometimes. But hey, they had free wifi before the Deutsche Bahn was even thinking about it! And a online media center with quite a variety of films free to watch.
They really made an effort to provide good service and offer a comfortable ride, so my experience.
I switched to ride sharing (not like Uber - but a in a way where someone who is taking a certain route anyway fills up their empty seats) since Flixbus got more expensive when their competition died out.
I travelled with Flixbus lots of times over the last couple of years and their WiFi is either broken or completely overloaded. Toilets commonly didn't have toilet paper or were downright unusable. Even more fun was that the Bundespolizei used to conduct random checks in Munich and pull out one or two passengers who then had their luggage searched for no good reason.
It is most likely in the "I need to make up something outrageous" part of the country. I have used Greyhound to go out of downtown LA and SF which are both situated in some of the worst places of their respective cities which are still accessible and saw nothing of the sort. The LA one was definitely very sketchy, but the Greyhound experience for me wasn't much different than the experience using long haul bus travel here in Europe. Yea the facilities are more run down, but the bus rides are much more fun since people actually talk to each other.
I think as a German that has been using different forms of transit in the US, I think you - unknowingly - are comparing apples with oranges: Flixbus is bad, yes - but only for German standards.
Inner-american travel comes with much less "classiness". I don't know why; I'd like it to be because of more price competitiveness, since more access for poor people is a good thing. But i dunno. Just that inner-US flights have the flair of an european subway-commute.
Anyways: Riding the bus in Germany was always only chosen by those who couldn't afford train or plane. This is why I loathe Flixbus! City-to-city bus rides were prohibited* in Germany until Flixbus basically "uber"-ed the prohibition away. But their network of busses, drivers and subcontractors are basically the same of what the market offered before.
Personally I'd never expected ICE-train quality standards for for a fraction of the price.
[*] = to be exact, the Deutsche Bundesbahn (state owned railway) had the only license to operate inter-town bus-rides, which - being a town-connecting railway company - they "just happened" to under develop.
Interesting. Public transport in America seems to be considered primarily just for poor people outside of a couple of east coast cities, where in most of Western Europe it’s a way of life.
I was also going to point to a much bigger hangover from class divide in Anglo-Saxon countries, but actually that doesn’t hold true in the UK — coach services in the UK tend to be pretty good for shorter journeys, perhaps because of strong competition? The Oxford London coach route is exceptional, with free food being given out in the mornings at one point, free WiFi, comfortable buses, and generally just a nice way to travel.
> Public transport in America seems to be considered primarily just for poor people outsid
Except the one mode of public transport that is most environmentally unsustainable and has a ~2.7x multiplier effect (vs just the fuel's CO2 emissions) to global warming [1].
It wasn't Flixbus that "ubered" the laws, it was DeinBus.de, that had a lawsuit with Deutsche Bahn. They sadly didn't grow to the size that was needed later, but they were the pioneers of the space.
As a German, Flixbus is quite ok. Comfortable buses, and most trips have electric outlets, wifi and a working toilet.
Compared to the train, their toilets are unreliable, they experience way worse delays (30m-1h delay is not unusual from my experience, very understandable since traffic varies), provide fewer routes and have a pretty bad experience at the bus station (small stations are ok, big stations are always chaotic, nobody knows anything, personnel has no announcement system or even megaphones and is trying to herd people around by shouting information). But Flixbus is usually significantly cheaper than taking the train, making them a popular choice among students and other price-conscious travelers with flexible schedules.
More competition can only be a good thing.