Anywhere But Here: How Megabus Became Britain's Cheapest Escape Route

A sort-of love letter to the only affordable means of getting anywhere beyond the four walls of whatever town you were born in.

by Angus Harrison

March 2, 2016, 9:20am

I have been sick on a Megabus only once. It was on the way back to Bristol from a day in London, after watching the cycling road race from Box Hill during the 2012 Olympics. I'd been sitting in the long grass under the hot summer sun, not something my skin took kindly to, and by the time I'd made it onto the Megabus, I was already experiencing nausea. An hour in, I realised I was going to throw up and ran for the toilet. The dimensions of said toilet were not unlike an upturned coffin, giving me no scope to bend my knees closer to the bowl. As a result I was forced to vomit downwards from a standing position, which given my height (6ft 2in) was a considerable vertical drop for the sick—a drop straight past my T-shirt and shorts. Once covered in my own miserable puke, I reached for some toilet roll. There was no toilet roll. There was no toilet roll. There was no toilet roll. I was forced to open the door, do a "general call out" to the rest of the passengers requesting some tissues, to which somebody eventually responded. I retook my seat next to a stranger, covered in a paste that the fluffy dry tissues had created when mixed with my vomit, smelling like chemicals and carrots and silently planned my way out of this world. It was at least another two hours before I got off.

Megabus commenced service in 2003. Launching with the promise of £1 tickets (plus 50p booking fee), megabus.com was an illustrious new player on the UK public transport scene. Down to earth and seemingly egalitarian, it offered a utopian vision of inter-connectivity and togetherness. Along with the endorsement of the then nation's sweetheart Barbara Windsor, Megabus also had the common touch. This was the people's bus.

That was the dream. The reality is more like bedlam on wheels. I have witnessed the following things on a Megabus: a phone call that lasted 2 hours and 45 minutes, a couple mutually masturbating each other under a big coat, somebody trying to steal stuff from the passenger in front of them, a wife calling her a husband a "selfish Simon" at 100-yard intervals all the way up the M4 (I later discovered his name was Jed), a man spilling a pint of milk on his own crotch, and once I'm sure, I'm so sure, a ferret.

On the 21st of February this year, a Megabus traveling from Chicago to Minneapolis exploded. Luckily no passengers were harmed, but the flames that engulfed the vehicle took with them much of the luggage stowed underneath. For one passenger, Darnell McKinney, this meant he lost close to everything – he had been on board the bus in order to move house. His clothes, possessions, even credit cards and birth certificates were all swallowed in the coach's charred skeleton. Fortunately this was a rare incident, but the circumstances were not unusual in the slightest—this was a man who packed his entire existence onto a big, blue bus. We have all been Darnell McKinney.

We might not realise it, but in the UK the Megabus has become one of the few truly shared experiences: diverse and indiscriminate. It's not hard to explain why. At the time of writing, if I wanted to travel from London to Manchester on Friday evening, it would cost me £8, whereas the equivalent train costs £81.40. Even if you have the money for the train, none of us are going to turn down a bargain that good.

We are living through a time where "being poor" looks nothing like it used to: you can have an iPhone 6, but only four quid in your bank account. Instead of sitting on savings and looking forward to owning property, we are in a state of constant financial nihilism, only looking as far forward as the end of the month. We'll blap our overdrafts on festival tickets, only to spend the weekend eating Pot Noodles and drinking supermarket brand lager. Spend £30 on tickets to a club night for our sister's birthday and turn up with petrol station flowers and a creme egg for a present. And wherever we go, it's always the same blue buses getting us there.

You can be whoever you want once you're off the bus—baller, banker, Shoreditch wanker—and nobody will be any the wiser that it only took you £6 and 7 hours to get there. However close to the end of the student loan, the last of the jobseekers, the final gasp of the minimum wage, there's just enough to get you back home.

Megabuses do not deserve praise, or love letters, necessarily. There is nothing sexy about a Megabus. There is nothing sexy about somebody sitting in front of you eating a curry while you hurriedly scrawl a Mother's Day card. There's nothing fun about the Megabus either. Their attempts at establishing Sid, the garish pink-faced cartoon bloke in a gold suit, as a mascot have largely come across like a politician trying to design a new Muppet. But we'd be foolish not to recognise that for anyone of a certain age living under a certain economic bracket, the Megabus is the only affordable means of getting anywhere beyond the four walls of whatever town you were born in. It's not romantic, but neither is the blood your heart beats around your body.

We might like to think that some other cultural signifier will represent us in decades to come, but the fact is our pop culture is dominated by the upper classes, and our underground is barely able to breathe before it is bought up by a brand and resold on four different platforms. What of our culture can we truly say we own? What is truly ours? Where do football supporters sit silently next to newly arrived migrants? Where do stressed mothers share rolling eyes with students who have just shaken off the worst of the previous night's ket binge? Where do pensioners force out reluctant shits at 68mph while tired teenagers play grime instrumentals through Beats headphones?

In the past few years, Megabus has started operating across most of Europe, serving over 120 destinations, as well as in the US and Canada. The Megabus arm of parent company Stagecoach now has revenues exceeding £1billion. Its empire is ever expanding. It is more powerful than some Gulf States. All because it has done something most companies can only dream of – it has given us something that we don't really want at a price so low we have no choice but to take it.