skyscraper101 said:
It took a whole hour getting from NJ Turnpike to the other side of Holland Tunnel due to the car traffic ffs
Yeah, traffic is a nightmare in New York at the best of times, and around Christmas it's diabolical.
My partner and i spent last week in New York, and returned on Baltimore on Saturday evening (Dec. 22) by bus. The Lincoln Tunnel was closed, so all traffic heading for New Jersey had to go through the Holland Tunnel. The trip from Penn Station to the entrance of the tunnel (about 2.6 miles) took an 1 hour and 20 minutes. I could have walked it twice in the same time period.
If you're traveling around the northeast, and you prefer not to pay Amtrak's inflated prices, you might see if you can take one of the (non-Greyhound) independent bus companies. When we travel between Baltimore and New York, we usually take one of the so-called Chinatown buses. They are, as the name suggests, often run by Chinese (sometimes Korean) owners, and they have routes between quite a few of the major cities in the northeast.
They are generally quite comfortable, and i've done a whole bunch of trips without once encountering an unsavory character. In demographic terms, the customers aren't that much different from Greyhound passengers--backpackers, students, low-income people (white and black), as well as a fairly high proportion of Chinese--but they don't seem to attract any of the worrying characters that you so often find on Greyhound.
Baltimore to New York is $20 one way and $35 for a return ticket. Compare that to $70 one way and $140 return on Amtrak, and the two of us save ourselves about $200 each trip, compared to the train.
Here's a couple of websites, where you can check out which cities they serve. There are a bunch of different carriers represented on these sites. A lot of the cities they serve are in the northeast (Washington, Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Newark, New York, Albany, Hartford, Boston), but some of them also serve cities even further afield in California, Washington, Arizona, Florida, etc..
http://www.ivymedia.com/
http://www.chinatown-bus.com/
Despite the name, not all of the buses pick up and drop off in Chinatown in NY. The one we caught the other day picked us up on 31st St., right next to Penn Station, and we've also used companies that pick up and drop off outside Macy's, on 34th St.
One word of warning: if you get a bus that picks up in multiple locations (e.g., some pick up in Chinatown and then in Midtown), it's better to get on at the first stop. I've seen people at the second stop miss out on seats because the bus is already full.
Most of the regular stations are disused now though 
D) 'Bitch n**ger f**k etc etc... What a nobber 
