Spirit airlines is dead and a bus travel boom looks likely – but will Greyhounds ever be cool again?

“I t’s a grueling experience,” Greyhound bus enthusiast Miles Taylor explains. “You’re not treated very well. Everyone is yelling at you the entire time. When the bus is late, they blame you for it, like somehow you’ve done something wrong. You just get screamed at for wanting to know what’s going on, because no one says anything.” Taylor is obsessed with public transit. “I never really grew out of my little boy train phase,” the 26-year-old said. He works as a scheduler for Boston’s MBTA and runs a popular YouTube account documenting the bus trips he takes for fun in his spare time. Taylor traveled across the country by Greyhound twice; a Boston to Seattle route took 104 hours. But even he admits that America’s bus system is far from luxurious – or even comfortable. But for many it remains the only option. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Greyhound owes at least some of this uptick to the recent shuttering of Spirit Airlines. The low-cost carrier was once famously known as “the Greyhound of the skies,” shuttling passengers on the cheap, with absolutely no frills. A Greyhound bus in Canada. Photograph: Lloyd Sutton/Alamy According to the outlet, after Spirit closed, search activity for Greyhound rose 20% from the previous year. Greyhound routes that overlap with former Spirit flights have seen a 30% increase in passengers. We could be on the verge of a boom in bus travel. …