I'm takin' a Greyhound on the Hudson River line...

I just got back from a trip to the US. This isn’t really a post about public transit since I didn’t take much public transit on my trip – however, I did ride the dog just about everywhere, including there and back.

I suppose I could talk about the way New York transit is fully integrated with New Jersey. It’s pretty incredible, really. The bus service out to the suburbs of New Jersey seems to be a public-private partnership (which doesn’t thrill me, but hey, it’s the US, right?) between Coach USA and whomever funds public transit in the New York-New Jersey-Philadelphia corridor. It’s a pretty good system if you ask me. A state full of low density suburbs, and yet, there is an excellent, affordable transit system of trains and coaches between any suburban village, town, or city you can think of, connecting them to each other and to NYC and Philadelphia. The GTA could learn something from that. I guess the GO system is comparable, considering the population density difference between our suburbs and theirs. However, I think we probably have better local transit systems in our suburban areas.

Here’s something amusing. See this?



This is a picture of the portable Greyhound Security booth at the Port Authority bus gate in NYC. I was surprised, and amused, to find myself and my fellow travelers being searched before boarding the bus. They searched through our carry-on luggage (but apparently didn’t need to search the big bags we were putting in the boot beneath, because those couldn’t possibly hold anything suspicious!), and then did a metal search of us with one of those wands. The woman next to me in line and I were cracking jokes about the whole production. That’s some high security operation they’ve got going on there. No terrorist could possibly outsmart that system! And I’m sure that, after flying a couple of planes into the biggest buildings in New York City, al Qaeda will want to follow that with an even more horrific spectacle, like, oh, I don’t know, hijacking a BUS.

Anyhow…the most beautiful part of the trip, as always, was the Delaware Water Gap, which you see on the trip between Toronto and New York City. The Delaware Water Gap separates Pennsylvania from New Jersey. Here’s a video I took of it today, coming back. Excuse the quality – I was taking the video through a not-pristine Greyhound bus window.



More about the trip back in the next post.