When I was younger, probably the early 1980's, Greyhound's ads revolved around a friendly driver carting grandma home to her rural farmhouse, where her family and friends were waiting and waving with smiles as "nana" came home. While Greyhound was never, to my knowledge, even CLOSE to that ideal, the picture that would be more appropriate for 2005 would be grandma being dropped in an urban bus station with no family and friends, 75 miles from home while a purse snatcher grabs her purse and a pimp offers her a shot at getting into "the bidness" and the driver roars off, laughing maniacally.

Greyhound's strategy has been to continually abandon rural communities across the country in favor of larger urban centers. While they feel it is the best way to serve their clientele, I feel it is a mistake, and a misappropriation of funding CLEARLY and explicitly intended for other purposes.

A look at Greyhound's large (100,000+) city depots clearly shows why. Each of the following examples is from my personal experience:

• In Topeka, Kansas, I was dropped at a closed bus station at 3:00 in the morning with 8 hours to await my connection and 3 hours until the station opened. Because the lockers were all inside, I had no choice but to sit with my luggage until the station opened.
• In Wichita, Kansas, my wife and I arrived on Christmas Eve 1993. My luggage had been lost (while riding on the bus beneath us...go figure), and the station closed at 9:00 pm, 1/2 hour after we arrived and 2 hours before our delayed family arrived to pick us up. We were forced to walk through a horrible Wichita neighborhood in search of a place where we could wait inside until our ride arrived.
• Same Wichita station, return trip. We were given "boarding pass" numbers and lined up like refugess a full 1 1/2 hour before the bus was to arrive. If we got out of line, we lost our place and had to get another number
• Milwaukee bus station, 1997. I was nearly mugged going outside the station to a nearby fast food restaurant to get some food for my pregnant wife and very hungry 2 year old daughter
• Albuquerque bus station, 2004. We were instructed to provide identification before we disembarked the bus, and were searched before reboarding, despite the fact that many of us had been on the bus since Las Vegas, Nevada.

Add to this the fact that large city bus terminals are in the worst neighborhoods. If I were directing a stranger to a large city on where to find street drugs or cheap prostitutes, I'd tell them to look for the bus station. This is more than just stereotypical, it is almost universal in my experience.

Small communities, on the other hand, have almost the opposite to say of their terminals. They are usually fairly well kept, and they often are part of the "social center" of the community.

More to the point, however, is that Greyhound receives federal transportation subsidies every year. These subsidies are provided for the express purpose of making public intercity transportation available in rural districts. By closing the rural stations, Greyhound is going against the very purpose of the federal subsidies it receives. In addition, Greyhound stations have no long term parking, meaning that if you can manage to get into your local station, it better not be in your own car, which will likely be towed or vandalized before your return on a trip of any length.

There is also the problem of jobs. Many lower income families rely on public transportation such as Greyhound to get them to communities where they can find better jobs or housing for their family. Removing Greyhound from these smaller communities eliminates that option, meaning that many families will have little choice but to "stay put" in a dying community and hope desperately for things to improve. The reverse problem is "urban blight", increased when a family goes to a larger city and is unable due to a lack of transportation, to move on to a smaller community, where the cost of living is almost invariably less.

Greyhound is, in short, an increasing federal boondoggle. It has outlived its usefulness, and continues to solicit, and receive, money that our government cannot afford to continue to spend on systems as grossly inefficient as they have proven to be. It's time to "put this dog to sleep" and explore other options.