> They are full of the sketchiest people of every city.

Partly because the bus station opened up in the 50s and remains in the sketchiest part of the city. There was rarely any real motivation to move them.

I used to take the bus several times a year between LA and Carson City NV. A 12 hour bus ride that would take me from scenic downtown LA and eventually drop me off in Carson City at a closed bus station at 5 in the morning. The driver was able to sell tickets to folks that were just standing by the highway at designated stops in the middle of the desert on the way up. We used to stop in Mojave for dinner at the cafe next to the bus shack^H^H^H^H^Hstation. I'd pick up cool Space Shuttle on 747 postcards while I was there.

Overall the folks weren't too awful on that bus, but it surely made for a long night.

Outside of the US, this is usually addressed by having a dedicated police unit residing at a station. Everything is pretty calm and civil after that. The fact that it's not the case in the US does not mean that it's inevitable to have such unsafe stations.

This so much. Anyone who has ever spent time having to be stuck at a Greyhound terminal in the south knows what true hell looks like. They are full of the sketchiest people of every city.

It's not the worst (i.e. a southern bus station), some parts of Chicago are the worst. It's just a god awful shitshow. I had a blast when I did it, yes there were crackheads, but you can make new friends with crackheads. There was a 'hood lady I made friends with and a sweet old foreigner grandma type visiting her kid... who didn't speak english.. so I helped her get there what with the 8 hour bus delay, which might be related to stations shutting down

It’s a choice to enable that situation, not an intrinsic factor. Bus terminals in South America are pretty nice.