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Bus driver is in good condition after Route 80 crash
by Julie O'Connor and Al Frank/The Star-Ledger
Saturday August 23, 2008, 3:48 PM
The driver of a tour bus that slid down an embankment along Route 80 on Friday remained hospitalized today, in good condition, a spokesperson said.
Everett Phillips, 48, was driving an Atlantic Express charter bus from Manhattan to Niagara Falls when it was clipped by another charter, then fell onto its side and slid down an embankment in Roxbury, Morris County.
About 80 passengers were aboard the two buses, but just two were admitted to Morristown Memorial Hospital, including Phillips, who suffered a back injury. Most other travelers walked away with scrapes and bruises.
No summonses have been issued, state police said.
Today, a representative from Hummingbird Tours of Deltona, Fla., the charter bus traveling behind Phillips, said its driver, Tommy Martin, 57, of Tampa, Fla., has not been involved in past accidents, but declined further comment.
Atlantic Express, which owns the charter bus driven by Phillips, could not be reached for comment.
The accident occurred at about 10:10 a.m. Friday after Phillips' bus braked for traffic and was clipped by as bus behind it, said Sgt. Julian Castellanos, a State Police spokesman.
The second bus, driven by Martin, continued across two lanes of Route 80, hitting a minivan that became wedged between the bus and a guardrail after it clipped the left rear of a tractor trailer.
Neither the minivan driver nor any of the 27 passengers aboard the second bus was hospitalized. They had been bound for the Poconos from New York.
The group on the toppled bus left Chinatown in Manhattan about an hour before the crash, which forced their bus over the concrete abutment of an overpass. It then flopped onto its right side and slid about 50 feet on a gradual slope, coming to a stop near Berkshire Valley Road.
The second bus stopped on the shoulder and was later towed while its 27 passengers were driven away on a replacement.
Of the 55 people on the first bus, 23 declined medical treatment and the rest were taken to area hospitals, Roxbury officials said. Most were discharged after treatment for bumps and bruises.
"It was a scary thing," said Vikram Mehta, 32, of Hartford, Conn, a passenger on the first bus. "We feel that we are lucky."
Fung Wah Is Getting Stuck In Low-Cost Bus Traffic Jam
By DAVID PEPOSE, Special to the Sun | July 15, 2008
Ms. Wambaugh added that BoltBus competes with Fung Wah in price because its online ticket purchasing system and its curbside service lowers its maintenance and human resources costs. Furthermore, she said, Greyhound's contracts with fuel companies allow BoltBus to buy diesel fuel at reduced prices.
While Fung Wah employees declined to comment, a company consultant who requested anonymity said it was not cutting any staff and hadn't seen any change in demand as a result of the increased competition. The consultant said the company receives 5,000 hits a day on its Web site, and "on July 4th, we filled every single bus." \
Some officials said the popularity of buses is only temporary. "There's clearly more players in the industry serving these routes than can be sustained," the president of the Economic Development Research Group in Boston, Glen Weisbrod, said. "They're trying to see which can outlast each other, because no one can make money on the low fares they have now."
A student at Wellesley College, Yael Misrahi, said prices and safety concerns led her to the newer bus companies. She said she's been warned against Fung Wah "by many people and told it was unsafe. I heard the bus drivers are not certified and that the buses are old and uninsured. That's why I would never take it ... on the other hand, I feel very safe on the Megabus."
If you travel up and down the East Coast between Washington, D.C., and Boston, you may have taken one of the many buses that run between the big cities' Chinatowns. Or you may wonder how they are. I’ve been a fan of the buses for some time, but they are not without their flaws.
My wife and I took a New Today bus from New York to D.C. on July 4 without incident, but the trip back (on Sunday, July 6) was rough. We arrived half an hour early, as advised, only to find about six busloads of people already waiting. (Not all of them were waiting for New Today buses; another company picks up passengers at the same place.) Some had been there for several hours. Each time a bus would come, a mob of people would rush to the door. Then the people at the back would start to push forward. It was hard enough to unload the buses, let alone get on one.
This was all very amusing until it started to rain. Hard. I don’t blame the bus company for the fact that I didn’t have an umbrella, but because of the crowds and the pushing even the people with umbrellas were getting soaked.
Eventually, someone called the police, and several officers arrived to provide much-needed crowd control. But of course the police could not conjure more buses.
We got on a bus about two and a half hours after our scheduled time (with some people who said they had been waiting for five hours), but the adventure wasn’t over. When we got to New York, the driver headed north from Midtown. When I asked where we were going, he said that the destination was 88th Street and Broadway. I explained that we needed to go to 88 E. Broadway, in Chinatown—about 95 blocks south from 88th.
A woman named Annie at the New York office said that New Today’s buses was running behind on Sunday because of holiday weekend traffic, which the rain only exacerbated. She also said that New Today had chartered other bus companies for the D.C.-New York route to resolve the problem, and that the driver of my bus must have misunderstood where he was supposed to go.
I don’t think New Today is worse than the other Chinatown bus companies, and they’re all preferable to Greyhound. But this experience did give me pause, and my wife says the lesson is that we shouldn’t travel on a holiday weekend.
September 10, 2003
COLUMN ONE
Busman Stops at Nothing
* After 9/11, Kazuhiro Nakagawa's business was reduced from $10,000 luxury tours to $40 trips up and down the coast, but he doesn't give up.
By Ronald D. White, Times Staff Writer
It was almost departure time, but Kazuhiro Nakagawa's 55-seat tour bus still had that "Not in Service" look as it sat outside the Wilshire Grand Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
Slowly, a handful of passengers assembled: two teenagers from Altadena, a frugal twentysomething couple just back from Israel and a 19-year-old German woman touring the country.
A few years ago, Japanese tourists paid Nakagawa $10,000 each for whirlwind tours of the Western United States on his luxury bus. With that market ruined by the sour Japanese economy and the lingering effects of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Nakagawa sought a new niche running a nonstop luxury bus service from Los Angeles to San Francisco, $40 one way.
...
STATEMENT OF JACQUELINE S. GILLAN
VICE PRESIDENT ADVOCATES FOR HIGHWAY AND AUTO SAFETY
CURBSIDE OPERATORS' BUS SAFETY
BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON HIGHWAYS, TRANSIT & PIPELINES
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
WASHINGTON, DC
MARCH 2, 2006