MANHATTAN — Megabus customers had a mega-pain on Monday when a Boston-to-Manhattan bus was left stranded on the side of Interstate 87 for over two hours.
Passengers on the double-decker bus said that the driver pulled into a Mobil Gas station near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx at about 10:10 a.m. Monday morning. The man said he had been driving for ten hours and legally could not drive any further, according to guidelines set by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
That left passengers stranded, with no way to get to Manhattan.
"They've let us off the bus on the side of the highway," said Dylan Byers, a Lower East Side resident on the way home from Boston. "It's not like you can catch a cab here, let alone the subway."
After taking all their belongings off the bus, Byers said they were originally told a new driver would be there within ten minutes. But more than two hours after the bus pulled over, passengers were still waiting.
"Why did they let him drive if they knew we're going to have a long drive?" Byers told DNAinfo by phone. "With traffic, it's going to take a long time to get into the city."
Passengers said a new driver finally arrived at about 12:25 p.m.
A spokesman for Megabus said the driver was scheduled to drive both to and from Boston, but that particularly bad traffic delayed the bus long enough to put him over his ten-hour limit.
For some passengers, that excuse wasn't good enough, especially after multiple calls to Megabus' customer service led them to representatives that did not know their bus was stuck in the first place.
"This is the most obnoxious thing I've ever experienced in my life," said Jadine Grednaway, on her way from Boston to New York for a shopping trip.
"No one on customer service knows where the buses are, but they took my money happily last night."
