In Kansas City, unlike larger metropolitan areas such as New York, using public transportation is a definite class marker. Taking the bus here usually means you don’t have money to own a car, and as someone who could afford a car, I had never made the decision to board a bus.

I did, however, make the decision to speed across US-36 through central Missouri en route to Illinois, which attracted the attention of one very angry police officer who promptly pulled me over and rightly ticketed me. I cannot recall all the infractions individually, but I can say that what would have been a single speeding citation was compounded threefold by it having occurred—apparently—in a marked construction zone.

As I stood at the bar in an Illinois bowling alley with my older brother later that night, I asked him not to tell our mother about this new price on my head. (By the way, mom, sorry you had to find out this way.) I finished my glass of that night’s special—some cheap domestic beer—and with that watery swill still wetting my mouth, I realized I couldn’t afford my new debt to the state of Missouri.

When I got back to Kansas City a few days later, I immediately started brainstorming ideas on how to scrounge up money to pay for my traffic tickets. I came up with a few wishful solutions, hopeful that my dilemma could be solved simply and easily. The first thing that came to mind was selling blood plasma. I’d made good money over the previous summer selling my plasma so I could afford bar tabs and some groceries while squatting on a friend’s couch. The likelihood that I could donate nearly $400 worth of plasma in less than 30 days seemed slim and the thought of actually doing so seemed down right unseemly if not exhausting.

But I had to come to terms with what I knew would have to be done—I just couldn’t get over the poetry of it: In order to pay my traffic tickets on time, I would have to sell my car. If the officer realized that by fining me for driving poorly would actually lead me to relinquish the very instrument of my poor driving, then I’m sure he would have felt he’d done a good job that day.

Defeated, I posted an ad online and sold the car within a couple weeks to a nice young man who’d effortlessly talked me down on the price. I’d have $100 leftover after paying the fines, most of which would be changed to singles and quarters and fed into the fare boxes that are inside every metro bus I’d be riding for now on. Without wanting to, I went from driver to rider, pilot to passenger, a reckless headlong animal with a gas foot heavier than a brain’s worth of reasoning skills to a tamed and neutered kid internally struggling with how to afford all these panhandlers at my bus stop.

I was used to driving my car alone, so I wore headphones to maintain a similar sense of detachment. But I’d underestimated how inquisitive bus riders could be.

What are you listening to? Does this bus stop at the Plaza? Crazy weather, huh? Are we going north?

I eventually began leaving my ear buds at home and gave myself fully over to the experience of becoming a straphanger.

I began seeing other ramifications of taking public transportation. I was actually leaving my apartment earlier because of the departure times. When I had a car, I justified leaving 20 minutes before my 9 a.m. class, hurrying through the streets and eyeing every red light as if it were some heartless, traffic-congesting devil. Behind the wheel, I believed that my trip was more important than anyone else’s and that I was naturally a more skillful driver than anyone else on the road. Everyone had to get out of my way. I’d gas my car through the dying moments of a yellow light, leaving all the other drivers behind only to see them reappear in the lanes next to me at the next traffic light. I see this person now from my bus seat, anxiously rapping his fingers on the steering wheel and craning his neck low to maintain a perfect view of the red eye. He is idling his car forward a few inches. He is preempting the dissolve from red to green. The routine is the same at every light. I do not miss this.

Another thing I don’t miss is parking. At $115 per semester for a day permit, parking on campus is both time consuming and expensive. A night permit is another $98. That cost alone covers a semester’s worth of bus fare. Considering the additional costs of gas, maintenance and insurance, I was—in the financial calculations of a broke student—saving a fantastic sum of money.

I read somewhere that no one knows his city like the transit rider does. The driver sees only other cars, but the transit rider sees faces and hears voices of the people in his own city, and they make up the ever-changing landscape in which the rider lives and determines his daily experience. It didn’t take long for me to begin understanding that.

Sometimes there’ll be a comical scene on board like the 40-something man that all but sung his uncompromising love for a bottle of chocolate milk, or the tiny, adorable old woman who expressed at least 15 different ways to describe cold weather. Or there’s the man I sat next to after buying a 12-pack of beer, who, with such a selfless enthusiasm, told me I was surely going to have a good night, like I’d just won the lottery and deserved it.

Some scenes make you feel less at ease, as if you glimpsed something very personal for a second: The disjointed, half-formed but in some very hard-to-describe way poetic ramblings of a very ill man breaking out of himself at the expense of an innocent, lone woman to whom he asked if she killed his baby. And once I glimpsed the eyes of the still, disconnected stare of the inebriate who had moments earlier planted face into the bus’s deck with the unflinching grace of a falling two-by-four.

But some days, the scenes you encounter appear more profound. There was the afternoon I watched a young black man give his front-of-the-bus seat to an old white man in a motorized wheelchair. The young man took a seat directly behind the older man, and had to swat the dangling Confederate flag that hung from the back of the man’s wheelchair whenever the bus experienced a turbulent bump.

There was the unassuming man, anxiously giddy like a child with a secret, who revealed an ability to tell you the day of the week for any date you threw at him. The riders tested him, checking his answers against the calendars in our phones, and he nailed every one. I was born on a Tuesday. Then there’s the one-handed man in my neighborhood who always has his disadvantaged arm wrapped around an old, dirty broom. He’s always the happiest man on the bus and I feel uplifted when I see him.

When I am on the bus, I am not in control—I’ve learned to accept and enjoy this. The idea of owning an automobile when I have even an underappreciated transit system available to me now seems crazy. Ditching my car was hard at first, but I eventually understood that I was making tradeoffs. I could leave whenever I wanted when I was in my car, but I had to find parking (and sometimes pay for it). On a bus, I never have to circle a parking lot three times before finding a space, though I do have to walk a little bit more. Instead of remembering to fill up and pay for a tank of gas, I have to remember to buy a pass. I’m not inconvenienced more while riding the bus—just in different ways.

I’m not suggesting everyone sell their Buick for a bus pass, or that buses are a far superior way of traveling. But once upon a time, I had to sell my car to pay off some traffic tickets and ended up having to rely on Kansas City’s public transportation system to get around. I learned to live with less, not just put up with it. I learned the idea of buying-out what bothers me is not a sound pursuit, and that if I continued to think so then I’d ultimately be bothered by everything. Most importantly though, I learned to stop looking only at the car ahead of me, and look at the people around me.

Bradley Trevor Hoffman is a student and freelance writer living in Kansas City with his girlfriend and their dog, Etta James. Follow him on Twitter, @BradleyTHoffman.

By my own crude estimates, I’ve spent nearly 140 hours riding back and forth on busses between New York and Boston for the past four years. That’s almost six days, for those of you keeping score at home. Any way you cut it, I’ve spent some serious time glancing out of windows at blighted cities in Connecticut and at never-ending stretches of snow-covered Harlem boulevards.

I’ve seen a lot during my time on these “motorcoaches,” which the more professional, less “leave-me-the-fuck-alone” drivers call their noble steeds. I’ve been offered drugs and alcohol by seatmates (I accepted the whiskey, not the painkillers), been shown naked pictures of girlfriends (not-so-surprisingly by the same guy who offered me the pills and booze), and witnessed complete strangers strike up a conversation with one another and spend the latter half of the trip cuddling and making out.

I’ve also spent a miserable 4.5 hours acting as a human pillow for a girl I knew from school who was more into me than I was into her, and was unfortunately traveling to Boston the same day I was. On other trips, I’ve pissed all over my shorts in the gyrating rollercoaster bathroom (if you can pee straight in there, you deserve a gold medal), broken out in hives from eating fennel the day before, and drooled all over my cashmere sweater attempting to sleep.

In general, I make a habit of limiting conversations with my seatmates, unless they’re a drop dead gorgeous female. Seeing that this almost never happens, my rides are mostly silent. I like it this way. It’s warm and fuzzy to think you’re going to meet extraordinarily interesting people on the bus, but in actuality, the small talk consists of the same “where are you from”/ “where are you going” blabber that none of us really care for. It ends after five minutes, and then you’re left with the awkwardness of an aborted conversation for the remainder of the trip.

What I practice is not anti-social and miserly—it’s purposely restrictive, subduing my inquisitive, hospitable nature so both my seatmate and I can sit back and attempt to relax without the guilt and embarrassment that comes with exchanging platitudes, and then sitting next to each other for four more hours with nothing more to talk about. I don’t think either of us really cares what the other’s favorite vegetable is.

The ultimate transit awkwardness comes when one seat in every pair is filled. For the unlucky bloke who walks on the bus at this point, not only is the dream of a single row to himself gone, but he then has to endure the walk of shame down the aisle to locate a rider whose face doesn’t say, “YOU BETTER NOT SIT NEXT TO ME.”

No honest, veteran bus passenger will tell you they want a stranger to sit next to him or her. To avoid seatmates, I try to look as miserable and angry as possible. You won’t find too many people who willingly sit down next the guy who looks homicidal. I find that this strategy works around 75 percent of the time. The other 25 percent, my seatmates are pleased to discover that I’m not a serial killer.

I’m lucky, I admit. I’ve avoided most of the interstate transit horror stories common to newspapers and gabby, overbearing parents. I’ve never been the unfortunate rider whose bus is taken out of service mid-journey for repairs, leaving everyone to wait three hours for the next one to come and rescue them. Thankfully, I’ve also never been on the busses that spontaneously catch on fire and burn out on the side of the road.

If you’re young, live in the Northeast, and have friends in major cities, then interstate, low-cost busses have most likely become a necessary evil for you. Are they comfortable? Absolutely not. Affordable? You bet your ass they are.

Bolt Bus provides the more luxurious ride, with black leather seats and the promise of more legroom, though I’ve yet to notice a tangible difference in personal space. Then there’s Megabus, which first made waves by offering $1 fares and double-decker busses. The split-level busses are fun to ride on, for your first trip, or if you’re seven-years-old. The $1 fares, however, seem to be an illusion. Ostensibly, they’re available, but I’ve never been able to find one, and they seemingly only exist if you book a 3 a.m. trip two years in advance. Bolt and Mega sit in a similar price range, with most fares sitting at $12-$20 depending on time and day.

As Bolt and Mega have monopolized short-distance East Coast travel (Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. are popular hubs), interstate bus stalwarts like Greyhound—and its sister company Peter Pan—have been forced to revamp their bus fleet. The Hound has a slew of shiny new busses with Wi-Fi and the works, but they also still run plenty of coaches that look like they use to transport minor league baseball players from one depressed coal town to another. You don’t want to get stuck on one of these for five hours.

Price-wise, Greyhound can ring in at nearly double the rate of Bolt or Mega, with about half of the luxury. I pay nearly $60 for my round-trip ticket from Framingham, Mass. to New York City, and I’ve traveled on busses whose stained seats and grubby windows sills will make you want to get a Hep. C shot after disembarking.

For direct service from Boston to New York City, Greyhound has also been forced to slash its prices and add more express busses (I’m guessing young travelers weren’t fond of stops in Worcester, Danbury, and New Haven) to compete with the new low-cost carriers. Greyhound tickets, however, are non-guaranteed. While I’ve never been barred entry onto a bus with a non-guaranteed ticket, I fear for the day when I’m left stranded at Port Authority, $30 lighter.

Greyhound is a palace compared to what I’ve heard about Fung Wah—the ultra, ultra low-cost carrier. Distracted drivers, unpleasant smells, a third world environment—these are things to consider while your Fung Wah coach is smoldering on the side of I-95.

Bus trips, by nature, are undesirable. Many of the same reasons why you hated the school bus also apply to coach busses. They’re cramped, rickety, and noisy due to the constant clatter of the bus hitting divots at 65 mph. If you can fall asleep, God bless you. Most of us are incapable of comfortably cramming our head against a Plexiglass window that shakes every 15 seconds.

My strategy to pass the time, for the 140 hours I’ve traveled by bus? Since I can’t read or write onboard (chronic motion sickness), and own only one DVD (Layer Cake, which I got from a friend for my 19th birthday), I spend most of my time staring out the window. I’d be lying if I said I was looking at the dropping leaves of a New England autumn or the sun setting over the Manhattan horizon.

No, I tend to look at road signs and rest stop McDonald’s. “When the fuck are we going to be there?” I usually ask myself.

Eli Epstein is a recent graduate of NYU and a freelance writer in New York City. His work has appeared online at The Atlantic, Fortune, and Esquire. Among other things, he enjoys cereal, Alice in Chains, and corgis. He’s a sworn Bostonian. Photo: dpstyles