Cool Megabus Deal
 

Hey everyone I just took a road trip to Chicago via Megabus. When I started searching for tickets I came across this deal that gives you 5% cash back. I just thought I'd share that with everyone - Link to deal

I would suggest anyone considering anything with them to check their safety record first.

Agree.

why don't you post that safety record, since i'm having a hard time finding anything that is overly concerning.

There are many, what I will call, "Chinatown" bus services with very bad records. While I don't doubt Megabus may not be as safe as say, greyhound, it's unlikely the risk of using this operator exceeds the risk of driving your own personal vehicle.

To be quite frank, they have had their incidents, but I am not aware of any widespread problems with this operator.

To put it plainly: 7 deaths in 5.75 million passenger trips over the last few years.

If you figure the average trip is 250 miles, that's 1,437 million passenger miles.

If you consider the average death rate across all motor vehicles (including privately owned) is 1.11 deaths per 100 million miles.

They are still twice as safe as driving it yourself.

As this has no miles or points component, I'll move the discussion over to the Travel Buzz forum.

You can search for a bus line's safety record at the US DOT website ...

http://ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/SMS/Data/Search.aspx

All you need the the name of the carrier and a state.

It looks like Megbus has many incidents of fatigued driving (driving too many hours) and driver fitness (many possible reasons).

Megabus is cheap enough that 5% doesn't do much. :)
Especially if you get one of their $1 tickets !

It seems that the main flaw with this deal is that I would then have to ride Megabus.

My son has taken them a couple of times between St Louis and Chicago.

It can be comfortable and on the whole acceptable. But they can get messed up and there is not a lot of support for the passenger waiting outside for a bus that has not come. I have had to call Megabus on my son's behalf more than once.

Yes, but when you extrapolate those statistics over the number of trips and miles actually taken in the same time period, it has less of an injury and fatality rate than driving your own automobile on the same route, on average. It's all relative.

Try it before you knock it
 

I posted that because Megabus has been my means of travel across the country. Its so cheap, you get free wifi, and you get time to meet and connect with people.

Megabus is a big international company, that started out in the UK where it's extremely popular. It's owned by Stagecoach, one of the largest bus operators in the world.

Like easyJet and Ryanair and Southwest, they changed the pricing landscape of bus travel. Just because they're cheap doesn't mean that they have a bad, Chinatown bus-like, service record.

What's your experience with them? Have I just been lucky?

I've taken them only to Philly, about 6 times - faster and half as expensive as the next option (NJ Transit), hourly service, and not much slower than Amtrak.

The group that bought the American operators started in the UK - Stagecoach.

Megabus is run by Coach USA, which is a collection of smaller american bus companies that united together not that long ago for better bargaining power. After being bought out they ran into some financial trouble so the company was split... east coast operations remained Coach USA while west coast operations were sold to another stakeholder that became Coach America. Today however Coach USA operates across the country as does Coach America, both continue growing and scooping up smaller bus companies.

Megabus was a project started at Coach USA that brought the European model to the US with the European double decker long distance buses, the nice Van Hools people like so much.

Their driving record is hardly different from Greyhound/Bolt Bus or any other operators like DATCO which is a separate company in New England but provide services under contract for Megabus. Their canadian operations are served by Coach Canada also part of Stagecoach.

Their safety record however is significantly better than the chinatown services mentioned above :)