Rating Intercity Transit Stops

In recent years, Greyhound has been closing down diners at their bus stops and even closing entire bus stations -- especially in downtown areas where that real estate can be sold for a pretty penny -- and moving some stops to local truck stops or similar.

This is problematic enough under the traditional assumption that travelers are poor, only interested in getting there as cheaply as possible and traveling directly from point A to point B with no rest stops along the way to spend a night or three in a hotel, eat, recuperate and mitigate the physical stress of long distance travel.

It's potentially vastly more problematic if you do want to take stops along the way.

The current mental model for long distance travel is that one of the two end points is home and the other is a destination where you have business contacts, family or some other local people who can help you figure out how to get to or from the transit stop to a hotel, their house or your house or similar. 

There's really no concept that you may be arriving in a strange city you've never seen before via public transit and leaving the station on foot, no driver's license, no car rental lined up and needing a hotel, sustenance and incidentals readily available at hand.

This is post one on this concept, so quick and very dirty:

1. Are there hotels within walking distance of the stop? (A half mile is considered "walking distance" by urban planners based on research. A quarter mile or less is better.)

2. Are there eateries within walking distance of the stop?

3. Are there eateries within walking distance of any nearby hotels?

4. Is there local bus service? How accessible is it? Is the transit stop next to a bus stop or part of a local transit center? Are local buses free? If not, do you need to jump through hurdles to pay? How readily can someone who has never been there before find a bus, get on it and go somewhere?

5. Are there convenience stores, grocery stores or a store like Walmart or Target where you can get groceries and other incidentals easily accessible from the transit stop and/or nearest hotels?

6. If you are in one of the hotels, how many eating establishments deliver to that hotel? In other words, how readily can you get a meal that works for you if you have dietary restrictions for medical reasons -- which most people have -- on top of "personal preferences"?

7. Is there anything nearby open 24 hours, even if it's drive through or walk up window only, whether eatery or gas station with convenience store? If they arrive at some ungodly hour because that's the only time that bus stops there or because the bus had issues and they arrived late, are they just out of luck for the next several hours? Or can they get something to eat?

8. Do any of the establishments take EBT? Because one of the reasons poor people do things like travel 39 hours straight is because restaurants, convenience stores and truck stops have a high incidence of not taking EBT. 

If you can somehow come up with a bus ticket and funds for a hotel stay, that's not enough because you probably can't feed yourself. It's extremely expensive to order restaurant food and have it delivered compared to buying groceries. If none of your food costs can be covered by food stamps, that's a barrier to travel which can be a barrier to escaping the shit situation keeping you poor and unemployed or underemployed.

9. What is the vending machine situation? These tend to not show up on things like Google maps and tend to be mostly filled with garbage I don't want, but if you are in somewhat desperate straits and can find even one drink option that's acceptable and one snack you are willing to eat, that can make a big difference at 3am, having not eaten in hours or whatever.

I don't quite know how to say this. I run several health sites and manage a serious medical condition with diet and lifestyle.

Eating the way you need to eat, when you need to eat, etc. is a major part of managing serious medical situations, including things like diabetes and pregnancy. Not having these amenities can lead to a potentially deadly health crisis, such as a miscarriage or ketoacidosis (a complication of diabetes for which they hospitalize you because it can kill you within 72 hours).

So to my mind, making sure you can take care of yourself in the most basic way of eating "your foods, your way" is medical care.

For a lot of poor people, intractable poverty is rooted in serious intractable medical issues. Financial mobility and physical mobility are interrelated.

It's not just that the Jet Set have money and can afford to travel. Their money is frequently rooted in ability to travel.

Big movie stars go on location to shoot multimillion dollar films and go places to promote those films. And while on location, movie companies hire catering businesses to feed everyone on set.

There's no clear, bright line here between ability to travel and ability to adequately support yourself. And we currently do all in our power to hamstring the ability of poor people and handicapped people to travel in comfort, affordably and in a fashion that accommodates their physical situation.

And then we act mystified that physical limits are so strongly associated with poverty and act as if their physical situation is the only factor in that.

Rich or other "privileged" demographics routinely get accommodation and perks that would make life vastly easier for handicapped people and we pretend that isn't why they perform as well as they do.

It's also frequently done in a very expensive fashion. That also isn't absolutely essential.

If you want 24 hour access to food with low overhead that doesn't require 24 hour staff and personal service, vending machines are a potential answer.

I have fantasies that vending machine food could involve real meals of better quality than microwave meals and my understanding is Japan has all kinds of crazy stuff sold in vending machines you would never see sold that way in the US.

This is a quick and dirty brain dump. It's me trying to imagine what I want to do with this site and is not intended to be education for people doing things like urban planning, but I did want to be an urban planner and this list is potentially a place to start for urban planners, transportation planners, people in transit services (like Intercity bus service or train service) or grass roots citizen planner types.

If you have a hotel near an Intercity bus stop, maybe you cannot attract a 24 hour eatery to move in next door but you could look into adding vending machines or improving the ones you have.

I was hiking on foot once while homeless somewhere so desolate I feared dying and changed my route to try to get somewhere with development and someone picked us up and dropped us in a small town at a Burger King. 

There was a train station in the historic downtown. The downtown was undergoing extensive renovation. There was no hotel right there in the downtown (or maybe nothing in our price range).

We walked to the nearest hotel at some reasonable price and on the way there, we stopped and sat on a curb to catch our breath and the employees of the gas station or whatever came out and ran us off and told us we weren't allowed to sit in front of the property. It wasn't even their property we were on. It was a bit of public landscaping along a public sidewalk.

Now I was actually homeless at the time. But I wasn't completely penniless and certainly wasn't trying to panhandle anyone. I was low budget traveling to accommodate my medical situation and try to find a place to relocate that would work for me. 

Between restaurant meals, EBT, a night in a hotel and other incidentals, we spent something like $300 in like 30 hours before leaving town. And some people were assholes to us for wanting to sit down and catch our breath outside the walkable historic downtown while carrying bags.

The historic downtown was full of benches. The rest of the main drag where most restaurants and hotels were located had zero benches.

The "pedestrian friendly" part of town was a touristy anachronism they wanted you to visit for how quaint it was. But fuck you if you need to leave that part of town on foot for some reason, like there's no hotel (or at least no budget friendly one).

If you want more travelers to come to town on a budget who don't drive and took the train or bus, you need to do something about stuff like that. No one wants to visit your town as a pedestrian and drop money there if leaving some tiny touristy section on foot gets them hated on and run off on the assumption that people on foot with luggage are the wrong kind of people and we don't want your kind around here.