Long Distance Romance? Get on the Love Bus

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One day in seventh grade, Rasheda Herndon walked up to Clyde Edwards, a tall, skinny, supernice guy in her class, and told him, “You’re going to be my boyfriend.”

Mr. Edwards was down with that. But Ms. Herndon wasn’t sure she was allowed to date, so she told him that there would be no “funny business” and he was relegated to holding her hand on or around school property.

They lost contact after junior high.

Decades later, Ms. Herndon and Mr. Edwards reconnected on Facebook. They exchanged messages about running — Ms. Herndon is an avid marathoner — and then they met for dinner when Ms. Herndon was in Washington, D.C.

“Bing, that was it,” Ms. Herndon said. “It just took off from there — game on.”

But Ms. Herndon was living and working in New York City, and Mr. Edwards had roots in the capital. They knew it would take more than texting each other kissy-face and heart-eye emojis to bring them together.

Then a white-and-green, 56-seat Cupid rolled into their lives: A charter bus that Ms. Herndon found both aesthetically pleasing and affordable. Now she can visit her “little honey bunny” — her words — nearly every weekend for rarely more than $25 each way (prices can start at $5) — without having to endure what she has experienced, she said, on other bus lines: Overcrowding, crumpled fast-food wrappers on seats, or neglected, smelly bathrooms.

Ms. Herndon and Mr. Edwards, who are both 43, aren’t alone. Many long-distance couples are relying on affordable, tech-oriented bus services to see each other regularly, turning the Jersey Turnpike into a freeway of love.

“We noticed via our internal technology that a lot of riders take the first bus after work on Friday, and then take the last bus home Sunday evening,” said Axel Hellman, a co-founder of OurBus, the company favored by Ms. Herndon (and others in this article) for its cleanliness, perks and unique routes. “And then we noticed that they do this every single weekend.”

When Grace Gardner met Autumn Trowbridge on a Tinder date in Washington, she was immediately smitten with the brunette she describes as “the most special person I’ve ever met.” But when it came time for college, Ms. Gardner, 22, enrolled at Baruch, in New York City. Ms. Trowbridge, meanwhile, remained in Washington, at George Washington University. They are a four-hour bus ride apart.

Ms. Gardner uses her dog-walking money to buy tickets. In order to maximize her time with Ms. Trowbridge, she often takes a Thursday night bus. The couple might spend the weekend doing homework side by side, or visiting museums like the National Portrait Gallery.

“Because we’re both in college, we’re trying to meet different people — this arrangement gives us independence,” Ms. Gardner said. “If we were in the same city, it might be more difficult — when you’re really, really in love with someone, you want to spend all of your time with them, and that prevents you from developing your own identity.”

If Ms. Gardner were instead to take Amtrak, she might pay anywhere from $49 to $96 for a one-way ticket, depending how far in advance she booked.

OurBus is popular with undergrads and graduate students. When Mr. Hellman founded the company with Narinder Singh in 2016, they crowd-sourced routes in suburban areas that had been previously underserved by bus travel, like Columbia, Md. They also began regular service to academic hubs like Ithaca, N.Y., and State College, Pa., knowing that their fare structure, modern technology and perks like free bottled water would give their product an edge in student-heavy communities.

If it weren’t for a New York City-Syracuse route, Vinayak Prabhu, a 26-year-old quantitative finance major at Rutgers, might not see his girlfriend, the “really pretty” graduate student who first caught his attention at a Walmart checkout line in New Jersey.

“I believe in face-to-face interactions,” said Mr. Prabhu, who lives in Newark. “While we do live in the age of FaceTime, there’s nothing better than being in close personal touch.”

Emily Shea also found love in a big-box store when Peter Hayes, 25, one of her roommate’s friends, who was visiting from West Chester, Pa., joined them on a shopping spree in Red Hook, Brooklyn, then gamely helped lug their purchases up to their new fourth-floor walk-up apartment in SoHo.

“I knew he was cool because he could deal with Ikea,” said Ms. Shea, 24, who works at an ad agency in New York. Now Ms. Shea and Mr. Hayes use the bus three weekends a month to see each other.

When OurBus introduced its West Chester-New York route in December 2017, it was as if Eros himself had heard Elizabeth Stackowitz’s pleas.

The 23-year-old Long Islander was sick of being “disgusted and dirty and cranky and hangry” on another bus line. She cited one incident where a man seated directly in front of her clipped his fingernails during the trip. To make matters worse, getting from New York City to Philadelphia was only half the battle. Her boyfriend, Thomas Griffin, 23, still had to pick her up and drive her and her belongings to his home in West Chester, an additional hour of traveling. This turned what should have been a joyous Friday-night reunion into an arduous journey.

Without a direct bus route, Ms. Stackowitz said, “I don’t know if we would have lasted, actually. If you can’t see each other, it’s hard to have a relationship over the phone. And with the train, I don’t know if I could have afforded that twice a month.”

Similarly, a nonstop route from Lancaster, Pa., to New York made it possible for Jelena Lojpur, 23, to simultaneously interview for jobs and visit her boyfriend, Christopher Harmantzis, 26, after he moved to Brooklyn to teach eighth-grade history at a Crown Heights charter school. She took an OurBus a few times a week for six weeks — a frequency that would have made train tickets and highway tolls financially prohibitive — until she landed a job here as a paralegal.

The couple now lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant and regularly takes the bus — together — to visit family.