Humanities & Cultures

It also is far easier to get screwed. I’ve had busses not arrive, train delays and the bus leaves and there’s no refunds, good luck calling one of their centers to try and get any help at all. It’s awful

This is definitely fixable with good consumer protections. In the UK, one of the few things that works well with public transport is being entitled to refunds when delays or cancellations happen, and if a delay happens that causes you to miss a connection, the travel company is responsible for rectifying that. For instance, last summer I was on a train that ended up being delayed by about 3 hours, which meant we arrived at a station after the last connecting train had left - so the train company called ahead and arranged taxis that got everyone to their final destination. The train tickets were also fully refunded, because any delay over an hour entitles you to that (smaller refunds for smaller delays - I get full or partial refunds on about a third of train journeys I take.) They definitely were not doing all of that out of the goodness of their hearts, but because the law says they have to.