My Neighborhood

We had this big event in DC yesterday....federal authorities started to show up at various points around DC and the Arlington area....where we have discount buses run.

Over the past decade, there's been this odd growth of bus companies that just appear, and run cheap routes from point A to point B.  For example....from Arlington to New York City....there's an hourly bus that runs the 3.5 hour route for $28 one-way.  From DC, there's a bus that runs to Philly every couple of hours, for around $25 one-way.  What folks do....is plan out this early run to some location....shop and walk around all day, and then hope the bus to return late that evening.

Well....there's been serious accidents.  In some cases, the buses just weren't capable of sustaining a safe run.  In some cases....the drivers were sleeping eight hours over a two-day period (at least claims were made to such an effect).

So yesterday, the Feds showed up around the region, and shut down 26 such operations.  It was fairly sudden, and abrupt.

Course, if you were a pondering person....you'd think about this.  Some folks had left at 6AM from DC, for New York City.  They walked around New York City all day and expected at 6PM to walk back to the loading area in New York City....find their return ticket, board the bus, and run back to DC.  Well....that didn't happen.  You can imagine forty folks just standing there on the street in New York....asking where the hell the bus was.....and why the feds had shutdown their bus operation.  In the end, they probably all walked down to the train station....paid out $120 for a one-way ticket from New York City to Washington, and grumbled all the way home.

Today?  Nothing.  A number of folks are sitting there with plans that had been laid out two months ago, and no bus company to make that trip happen.