In the public transportation pecking order, riding the bus is somewhere just above sitting in the back of a yak-drawn cart. But there were several passengers on board a Greyhound bus in Missouri this weekend who would probably have chosen that cart because at least they wouldn’t have been stranded and without a driver.

According to reports, the bus with 45 passengers on board left Memphis on Friday night bound for St. Louis.

Somewhere near the town of Sikeston, MO, the driver booted an unruly passenger from the bus. After driving a few more miles north up I-55, the driver pulled the bus over, told passengers she was leaving and went outside to wait for someone to pick her up.

Passengers called the police, who arrived and told the driver to get back to driving, which she did for a few more miles until she pulled into a gas station and abandoned the bus for good.

That was around midnight. It wasn’t until 8 a.m. that a replacement driver arrived to take the bus the rest of the way to its destination. The passengers finally arrived around 11 a.m., ten hours after the originally scheduled arrival time.

“I felt like I was being punked,” one passenger tells of the ordeal. “I was upset. I was scared because I didn’t know if a new bus was going to come. They kept saying a new bus was going to come, but no buses came so we had to spend the night on the bus.”

“In my tenure with Greyhound, I have never heard of something happening like this,” a rep for the bus company tells the Memphis Commercial Appeal. “It’s inexcusable and certainly unprecedented… We have not made contact with [the driver] since she left the bus… She’ll face significant disciplinary action.”

The passengers will be receiving full refunds and possibly more. The Greyhound rep says the company “will work with them on a case-by-case basis.”

Driver abandons bus passengers between Memphis and St. Louis [Memphis Commercial Appeal]

Greyhound passengers stranded after driver deserts them [KSDK.com]

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