Comment by j-wags
1 year ago
I think you're misunderstanding. GP isn't saying "drawing randomly from all videos of unsafe situations, a large fraction of them occur on long-distance buses". They're saying "drawing randomly from all long-distance bus videos online, a large fraction of them have unsafe situations".
There are a number of travel vloggers who do a trip exactly once and report on what happened. The same vlogger will make videos about taking ships, trains, airplanes, and long- and short-distance buses, in a variety of countries, on a variety of budgets. Among these vloggers, it is generally agreed that long-distance buses in the USA are the worst form of transit in the developed world. Their videos on other forms of travel rarely (if ever) show the kinds of unsafe experiences they have on long-distance buses in the US.
I'm also a numbers person and I've looked around to try and find stats for how dismal the safety and on-time performance of US long distance buses are for you, but none are published. I can just report that the cancellation rate is well over 10%, the on-time performance is maybe around 50%, and personally speaking the experience is frequently unsafe and miserable.
I don't mean to make this personal, but if you're in the US, consider driving to the local greyhound station/pick up and just waiting there for particular bus. It's really one of the worst experiences you can have in a city.
Some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uPDQvqoN4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8QGTaGwxxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTpt4tMnDT0
Read my other comment. I have ridden inter-city busses in the US on many occasions and picked up people at the stations. They've generally been on-time. My personal experiences have been pretty alright. A few times the WiFi didn't work but that was about it when it comes to my own negative experiences. The bus stations haven't exactly been in the nicest parts of town, but I've never experienced anything like violence there. Outside of chartered trips I haven't done a multi-day bus trip, most have been straight city pairs. Houston <-> Dallas. Dallas <-> Austin. Austin <-> San Antonio. Etc. But I'm not then saying that's always typical, to actually judge the performance I'd look at the larger statistics.
> the on-time performance is maybe around 50%
I posted Greyhound's on-time statistics which was 90%.
> who do a trip exactly once
What a way to collect statistics. I just stepped outside. It wasn't raining. I guess it'll never rain.
> drawing randomly from all long-distance bus videos online, a large fraction of them have unsafe situations
Well yeah, once again, are there really going to be a lot of popular videos of "I took a five day bus ride, nothing happened, here's an hour-long video of the travel!" And are those really random videos or ones the algorithm have bubbled up to the surface? Think a video with crazy stuff happening would bubble up in the algorithm rather than an hour long video where nothing of note happens? Maybe analyzing statistics by one-off example YouTube videos made for clicks isn't the best way.