Poor people generally fly budget airlines like Spirit or spend a few extra dollars to ride with a more reliable bus company. Greyhound is the safest way to get from state A to state B with an arrest warrant. It’s often exactly as bad as advertised. A Greyhound rider should not be surprised to encounter suffering, disease, violence, or intense emotional disturbances on a 20+ hour journey.

It's an interesting experience; I think tourists should try it at least once.

We (as recent immigrants) used Greyhound some 20 years ago for a trip from San Jose to Las Vegas. My recollections were:

* Several of the stations were in very scary areas of the cities (I particularly recall the one in Los Angeles).

* Most of the passengers seemed quite decent people, but very poor.

* In many of the Central Valley stops, there was indeed somebody in clean but shabby clothes with minimal luggage waiting to board, with an uniformed officer next to them making sure they got on. Many of these cities house state prisons, and the practice seems to be to supply prisoners who served their sentence with a one way ticket somewhere.

* There were no problems with violence or disruptive behavior; the passengers pretty much kept to themselves. And there was a complete absence of the entitlement problems that sometimes plague airline travel.

I've heard since that Greyhound on the East Coast was a bit less blighted than on the West Coast.