GO GREYHOUND, GO DOWNSCALE.

Guardian travel correspondent Joanna Pocock looks for the good on the intercity bus.  "Gone are the small, clean, cheap motels and public spaces where anyone can find a place to nurse a cup of coffee. Yet the camaraderie of the Greyhound is hanging on."  It's still possible to find Greyhound bus stations in places, although travelling anonymously and paying cash isn't what it used to be.

My first stop was Detroit. I was unable to find a clean, cheap hotel in the centre of town. My only option was to download an app by Sonder, which offered affordable Airbnb-style apartments with kitchens (thus saving me money on food). I handed over my debit card details to this San Francisco-based hospitality company and received a code with instructions to a room in a faceless building. I would not meet another human during my stay.

This atomisation, and the reliance on tech for our most basic human needs, unnerved me. It became a leitmotif during my trip, and also spoke to something I saw repeatedly: the exclusion of those without smartphones or credit cards. The cashless society appears to be winning.

From Detroit, I headed to St Louis, via Columbus, Ohio, where the Greyhound would hit Route 66. My 20-minute stopover in Columbus was where a picture began to form of what Greyhound travel looks like today. The bus station consisted of a parking garage the size of a small airplane hangar. At both ends, electric doors opened and closed when a bus entered or exited. Between the two bus lanes sat a small concrete island where passengers were disgorged. There was a chemical toilet, no drinking fountain, very few seats and no windows. The air was choked with exhaust. A police van was parked at one end of the tunnel and armed policemen stood against a wall facing us.

Her itinerary reveals a gap left in Amtrak's national network with the end of the Detroit-St. Louis Wabash Cannon Ball, and Route 66 begins properly in Chicago, although she will be on the interstates paralleling that highway west of St. Louis.  Greyhound used to have proper bus stations, including station agents, including in the smaller communities.  When I hired out at Northern Illinois, the staffed station even accepted parcels for shipment.  There is still Greyhound service through DeKalb, at least I see busses so painted: but you have to be a digital citizen to find the schedules and book tickets.

These days, well, "down and out" appears to be the reality, for the company and for the clientele.

If you had commissioned an urban planner to design the most hostile, uncomfortable and unhealthy environment for passengers, this would be the result. I guess this is what you get when you travel in a seat costing $35 as opposed to a $200 plane ticket or in a car with a full tank of gas.

My next bus was scheduled to leave for St Louis – a mere 530-mile trip – at 3.00pm. I looked around at my fellow island-dwellers: an elderly man with four large zip-up bags printed with “Patient Belongings”; a couple travelling with a large fluffy blanket propped up against the Porta-Potti as a makeshift bed; a mother and her teenage son carrying large cardboard boxes. The sign on the empty Greyhound kiosk read: “As of 25 January 2023 – you will need photo ID to buy tickets.” Yet another barrier between those with little money, no fixed address, no car, no passport or credit card and their ability to travel.

Five pm and still no bus. Another passenger, a university student from India, had been checking his app, which showed that the bus had been and gone. How could we have missed it when we hadn’t left our island? Ruben, a young Amish man, approached. I gave him my phone so he could tell his family he would be late. A one-handed man asked us if we knew what was going on. We didn’t, so he told us his story: he had lost his wife and daughter recently and had just emerged from a 14-month coma – the result of being electrocuted at work, which also saw his hand melt. Like so many of the people I met on the road he had suffered extreme anguish, but had found God. “I am now never alone,” he told me.

Getting to St. Louis was not part of the fun, either.

The four of us were discussing tactics when a Greyhound employee showed up. Desperate passengers trying to get to bedsides, parole hearings, jobs and loved ones swamped her. She looked utterly out of her depth.

Our bus showed up, but we were further delayed while passengers on it waited for their luggage. Apparently, its faulty hold had opened and bags had scattered along the highway – or so the story went. You never quite know on a Greyhound. The rides can take on a mythical dimension. Our driver had never done the Columbus–St Louis route before and we wound our way through unlit back roads until a marine on board snapped and ordered her to use his GPS.

At Indianapolis, the driver – shaken and angry – quit. A replacement was found, and we got into St Louis as the sun was rising. An eight-hour trip had stretched into 24.

Let the record show that Columbus to St. Louis was on Amtrak's national network, until the National Limited made its last run as part of President Peanut's economy measures.  The experience did not get any better west of St. Louis, and, although it is still possible to go to Las Vegas in a $20,000 automobile and ride home in a $500,000 bus; the bus station is no longer on the Strip.  To get from Albuquerque, on Route 66, to Las Vegas?  You can't get there from here.

The only direct Greyhound bus you can book from Albuquerque to Vegas takes a minimum of 21 hours and does a bizarre route via San Bernardino. This is where you have to get creative. I worked out that if I went to Phoenix and changed there, I could do the trip in less than 18 hours.

I decided to walk to Albuquerque’s bus station early as I was tired of lugging my backpack around. A city bus honked and pulled up next to me. The driver motioned for me to get on rather than walk alone in the dark. What I didn’t know was that Greyhound stations now often close between buses to keep homeless people out – yet another communal space closed to those without the money to access private spaces. Dozens sat on the steps of the station shivering; some were lying in the foetal position; others hopped from foot to foot like their feet were on fire. I gave what food I had to anyone who wanted it, but I still had an hour before my bus.

I remembered [Simone de] Beauvoir’s descriptions of bus stations with restaurants, juke boxes, showers and lockers she compares to columbariums. Columbariums! I walked to a cafe where I very slowly nursed a cup of chamomile tea as part of my near-dehydration diet which had managed so far to keep me from having to use a bathroom on the bus.

Although her essay has not a little political economy in it, nowhere does she contemplate the possibility that after deregulation of air-fares, the people who didn't have the means to fly at regulated coach rates now had the means to fly coach, and whatever propensity they might have had to insist on decorum on the intercity bus no longer showed up to ride the bus.  It's not that the air carriers are treating passengers well these days either.