RSS Feed
Print Story
E-mail Story
Robert Price: Stranded once too often, this traveler wants feds to pay attention
| Saturday, Jun 14 2008 6:13 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Jul 17 2008 11:35 AM
It was 3:30 in the morning when Jack Turnbull's bus pulled in to the Greyhound station. From all appearances, the town of Florence, S.C., was still asleep — and unfortunately, that included the bus station itself. It was locked tight, lights out, no pay phone in sight. Turnbull stood alone on the sidewalk, stranded.
BAKERSFIELD.COM HOT TOPICS:
Loading Stories
Advertisement
The situation might have been no worse than monumentally inconvenient were it not for the fact that the neighborhood was also pretty dicey.
"It wasn't the place for an 81-year-old man to be, that's for sure," Turnbull said.
Twenty minutes went by before a friendly cab driver spotted the retired attorney, visiting the East Coast from Bakersfield, and allowed him to ride along until the bus station opened at 7. When Turnbull, finally safe inside, told his tale of hardship to the woman behind the counter, she shook her head sympathetically. The same thing had happened to many others, she said.
That was 2002, but it all came back to Turnbull, now 86, when he started reading about talk of an airline passengers' bill of rights. Being trapped for hours on end on a tarmac, deprived of food, water and working toilets, was indeed intolerable. But at least people in Congress were working toward a solution; the Senate could have a bill in place by year's end.
The same can't be said about the indignities, inconveniences and, on occasion, outright dangers that face travelers using that most common of common carriers, the interstate bus. Nobody, as far as Turnbull has been able to learn, is looking out for those passengers.
And he has looked. After he was stranded a second time in New England last summer, Turnbull wrote to Congressman Kevin McCarthy and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, among others, to tell his story, and ask: Do any federal regulations apply here?
Some ought to, and now more than ever. Fuel prices have summer travelers looking for options to the family station wagon; the airlines have started charging by the pretzel and pulling out of less profitable markets. Bus lines are clearly affected by fuel prices, too, but they're an increasingly palatable choice for many.
Air travelers' complaints seem to get all the ink, though. And although bus passengers don't get stranded on tarmacs for hours on end, they can have issues.
A couple such issues came to light for Turnbull last August, when he purchased a round-trip ticket from Peter Pan Bus Lines Inc., a Springfield, Mass.-based carrier that serves 100 cities in the Northeast, to travel from his native Rhode Island to a small town in Maine, with transfers in Boston and Portland, Maine's largest city.
When he got off the bus in Portland at 6:30 p.m., Turnbull asked the man behind the counter when he could expect the bus to Waterville. "We don't go there," the clerk replied. Turnbull could get to Waterville via a different carrier leaving from a different bus station, but he'd have to wait until the next morning. In the end, left to decide between sleeping on the sidewalk, finding a hotel room or just getting to his destination as painlessly as possible, he opted for a $135 taxi ride.
Peter Pan apologized for the inconvenience but rejected his request for reimbursement other than the unused, $55 portion of his bus ticket. (Contacted recently, a Peter Pan official said she "does not believe that Mr. Turnbull has been treated unfairly.")
Meanwhile, McCarthy and Feinstein forwarded Turnbull's letter to John Hill of the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Hill responded by writing that his department had no jurisdiction, but pointed out that bus companies were obligated by federal regulations to "mitigate, to the extent possible, any passenger inconvenience caused by disrupting travel plans."
To Turnbull's way of thinking, though, that $55 refund was restitution, not mitigation. The company "had no policy for dealing with the inconvenience caused by disrupting my travel plans," he said. Peter Pan "forced me to exercise my own judgment, yet it refused to abide by it."
If the Transportation Department's motor carrier division has no jurisdiction, Turnbull wanted to know, who does? In 60 years of travel via Amtrak and commercial airline, Turnbull noted, he had occasionally faced cancelled flights, late arrivals and other inconveniences, but the carrier had always tried to make it right in the end. Why not bus companies?
Turnbull isn't suggesting a separate bus passengers' bill of rights. "You've already got this language (in the federal transportation regulations) that purports to give protections to all passengers," he said. "But it does nothing. Why not just amend the existing law to expand the definitions" of vague terms such as "mitigate"? And, in the process, put bus riders on equal footing with other travelers?
Call it the democratization of common carriers. Call it a longshot. But why should some passengers have certain basic rights, but others not? Smells a little like class privilege. The old, retired contract-law attorney can't abide that kind of thing. Nor should he.
Reach Robert Price at 395-7399 or rprice@bakersfield.com.