Dallas

Greyhound Bus Delays and Re-Routes Cause Holiday Travel Nightmares

Whether it's a plane, train or automobile, travel delays can be excruciating, especially around the holidays. But imagine spending 12 hours on a bus and getting nowhere.

It happened to dozens of people in Dallas on Wednesday.

The sign on bus 86306 read, “Los Angeles,” but on Wednesday, the bus made a lengthy round trip from Dallas...to Dallas.

"We left here this morning at about 5:00 a.m. and almost 12 hours later we're right back in Dallas," said passenger Mickey Hewlin.

The driver made it four hours west before turning around because of slick roads. A Greyhound spokeswoman told NBC 5 that if a driver doesn't feel as though they can operate the bus safely at any time, they're encouraged to not do so.

But the U-turn was not the only complaint from passengers.

"She told us to shut up and everything. She bad-mouthed us," said Steve Puente, a passenger.

Larry Toney recorded the bus driver shouting at them when she pulled over.

In the recording, she can be heard saying, "You want to be smart with me, I'll call the state trooper and have him put you off the bus right here. You will go no farther." In another section the driver tells passengers to “Shut your mouths.”

Even more frustrating, passengers say they watched another Greyhound drive by them through the same conditions.

"She tells us oh he's been a driver longer than me, he can handle it, and I'm like well if you can't handle it, I don't want to be on your bus!" Jaznique Jamerson said.

For many riders, this was just one reversal on their cross-country trips. Toney spent two whole nights stuck in separate terminals. It's day three of what should have been a two-day trip from Atlanta to Fresno, California, and he and his two young children haven't even made it out of Texas.

"They feel like this is the lower level of traveling and they don't care because they feel like we don't have any money. If this was Delta Airlines and a plane had to turn all the way around, people would be fired," Toney said.

His mother and other family are waiting to celebrate with them in California. "They still got presents under the tree,” Toney said. “We missed Christmas."

Before arriving in Dallas, many of the passengers, including Toney, were stuck overnight in Birmingham, Alabama, when they say another driver didn't show up. They say they had to get help for one passenger when her oxygen tank started running low.

A spokeswoman for Greyhound Dallas told NBC 5 they're looking into how their driver treated passengers when she decided to turn the bus around on Wednesday.

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