Dozens Of Passengers Left Stranded At Bus Station In Center City
By Jan Carabeo
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Dozens of bus passengers were stranded overnight at the Greyhound bus station in Philadelphia.
There was a lot of confusion and lot of waiting Monday morning, but no answers for many frustrated people wanting to board buses from Center City to a number of destinations.
Some passengers claimed their bus to New York City never showed up. Others going to Pittsburgh and Ohio said the same thing.
One woman traveling to Virginia said Greyhound overbooked her bus and that she was left without a seat. She was supposed to leave Sunday evening, but instead was forced to spend the night at the bus terminal and wait for another bus that wasn't expected to leave until Monday morning.
"You think you're going to start getting loaded for the bus at (midnight). Then you find out that there is no bus," said Cynthia Roller of Camden, New Jersey. "(Greyhound) said the bus driver, they can't find one. He is on the way. Two hours later, 'we can't find a bus driver.' You have to sit and be patient."
Roller was headed to Ohio for a family vacation. She had four children with her. She was able to get a refund and said they planned on going back home and spending their vacation in Atlantic City.
An employee told CBS 3 that Greyhound was offering refunds to those who paid with credit cards, but couldn't immediately reimburse passengers who paid in cash, because they don't keep that kind of cash on hand overnight.
Greyhound officials released the following statement about the incidents: 'A schedule traveling from New York to Pittsburgh was delayed in Philadelphia due to a lack of resources. There has been an increase in demand from the Philadelphia market. Therefore from time to time, we contract with rental companies to provide buses in order to cover this demand, and the rental company failed to show up this weekend. We are currently looking into why this happened and talking to the vendor.
Because of the delay, original bus driver ran out of federally mandated hours to make the trip. Bus drivers can be on duty for 15 hours, but can only drive for 10 of those hours and then have to rest for at least eight hours, but our bus drivers rest for nine hours. The safety and security of our customers is our core value so we had to locate another bus driver that had the available hours to operate the schedule.
A bus driver was located this morning and the customers are currently en route to their final destination.'
