AMBATO TERMINAL SUR
Terminal Sur de Terrestre Ambato
Panamericana and Juan Guerrero
Panamericana and Juan Guerrero
Intersection of Avenida 27 de Noviembre and Jirón 28 de Julio, Nro. 819
https://maps.app.goo.gl/tayuRWBGaBsFGBpbA
As a veteran bus traveler across Latin America, I've logged near a million kilometers in every country from Mexico on down to Argentina, going over rickety bridges in the rainforests of Brazil to buses in Chile that felt like a private jet.
I've boarded hundreds of separate bus carriers operated by different governing authorities and that often come with different social customs in terms of what is expected of a passenger, a ticket transaction, or who can sit where.
It's a lot of fun to be surprised and learn that riding a bus is where life happens, like that time I wanted to head up to a village in the highlands of Ecuador, and because I was the last one on board, I had to sit on a sack of potatoes and take turns holding a chicken to keep it calm.
Even with all the wild variety from one bus to the next, or one country's culture of public transportation to the next, I have still managed to locate some norms or patterns that provide a unifying truth to bus travel. The inverse of this is also true: that there are some common conceptions or prejudices that travelers have about buses, and those prevent them from using the bus in their travel or worse, give them an uncomfortable shock.
So I thought I'd devote this blog to naming and dispelling the top 10 myths about Latin America bus travel. If you are a bus geek like me and have even a fraction of the experience, you could probably clear up some more myths that didn't make my first cut here. Hopefully, this will both comfort and encourage other travelers to try something they have been so far unwilling to do, and in the process have the greatest adventure of their life.
Neither is true. Bus companies are some of the most experienced hands at retail economics. It is an extremely competitive enterprise, and so every day since the beginning of time, in every little town or big city, bus operators change their mind to respond to market conditions. And they can. They're privately owned and operated small businesses; virtually none of them are run by some heavy-handed regulating authority. Bus companies measure volume, they look at another bankrupt bus company of the day as a golden opportunity to modify their routes to fill the gap, they look at the people coming in the door compared the seats on their bus and the handful of staff they need to mobilize...in order to make the day profitable. In essence, even if they're a big professional company with their staff wearing fancy uniforms, they all shoot from the hip to stay ahead of the game.
What this includes is their constant experimentation with how to fill seats in order to keep a published departure time valid. Since digital ecommerce came of age, a relatively small percentage of bus companies have had the capacity to sell reservations online, but with that there are economic pitfalls as much as gains. For example, they often only list a limited selection of their departures online exclusively -- meaning you can't walk into the bus station and find that departure available, but you can online. It's segregated purposefully to sell advance reservations to online buyers ahead of it being available generally, so that the bus company can measure the velocity at which seats sell, and if it's going slowly, they can cancel the entire departure and have it only impact the few customers it was available too.
Another example is a bus company may find it useful to exclusively offer a departure through online sales because they can rely on the seats filling up early, which allows them to then plan if a second bus needs to be added at or near the same time for overflow that they would turn to their terminal customers to offer.
Take a look at the opposite scenario, where there are tons of terminal departures that are canceled without any notice. Handling that directly and exclusively at the terminal without any online apparatus is much to the benefit of small bus companies that in principle offer a departure every hour, but if only a few passengers buy a ticket, it's much easier to reschedule them to the next hour because they didn't buy in advance. So they just tell those passengers to wait an hour, or find another competitor company who is going somewhat the same route. This freedom from the online predicament saves them heartache from having to inform passengers who got their tickets in advance online that their scheduled departure was canceled.
So what do you do? Reserve online. Over time, bus companies are getting better at their craft in the digital space. They are performing fleet management better every day, they're collecting data on seasonal volume and not just daily volume, and they're able to more quickly downsize or upsize to another type of bus if demand requires. Buying at the bus station is still much more a risk overall, unless you have a lot of time to kill. Just like at an airport, hardly anyone anymore just goes to the airport without having a ticket in advance, going from one ticket counter to another looking for an open seat to their destination, which by that time are already selling at a much higher premium than if they had bought it online earlier.
Buses are not planes. As long as they hug the ground, they don't have any gravitational law that compels them to not stop. And without that, cold hard cash fills the void quickly as their driving force. First let's talk about the spanish terminology, and then I'll share why it doesn't even matter anyway. Directo would seem to equate as "direct", but that's not what it really means. Directo means no side trips and no change of buses at some station. It does not mean that the bus won't make stops. Ejecutivo would likewise could delude you in that you think it means some kind of executive class of bus, but really this is the term bus companies use when they don't "plan" to make any intermediate stops between orgin and destination.
Having said all that, take both directo and ejecutivo as aspirational in nature, not inviolable truth. Even when bus companies say nuestro compromiso, or our guarantee, they will always be easily persuaded to make a stop to let off a passenger, pick up a new one, if it takes just a few seconds. Why? Money. This is how bus companies meet their daily bottom line, by having a reputation that people can rely on for exceptions, and by packing as many people into a bus as possible before they reach the destination. They are terrified of empty seats, so if you see empty seats when you get on the bus, take that as a sign that of course they are going to be eyeing the roadside along the way for anyone that wants to board.
It also depends on the bus driver. Sometimes, a driver will be less concerned about the balance sheet of the company and looking for passenger opportunities, and instead a regulatory guardian and concerned for the company's promises of being direct. So sometimes you will see a driver shaking his or her finger in a "no" signal at a roadside passenger, meaning he won't stop to let them board.
Buses are not trains. They don't have a dedicated lane. They have ot deal with traffic the same as you would driving a car to work. All they can do is estimate. Now, it's more reliable that the departure time will occur as scheduled, because even if they got into the station late, the passengers ready to board the bus will already be queued up, passengers getting off the bus are usually more expeditious and prepared to get their luggage and go, and bus companies can sometimes cut some corners with paperwork and labor shuffling if they arrived late to a station before they need to depart on the next schedule.
Arriving to the destination, however, is going to be on time only if there are no obstacles to their normal plan. Highways and roads are full of obstacles, because human activity lives right alongside of them. Drivers always need to be vigilant and safe in responding to road conditions, which will slow them down, and then as discussed earlier, they also may elect to sacrifice timeliness in order to pick up extra passengers that help them meet profitability quotas for that route.
My rule of thumb is for every hour of your scheduled bus trip, add 10 minutes of buffer for the bus to the scheduled arrival time to get a better sense of the actual time it will get you to where you're going. So if a trip is 3 hours, expect it may actually take 3.5 hours. AndesTransit also adds in a buffer to most of our published schedules, in other words, we round up the estimated arrival time, but we're not perfect either. Use my formula of adding 10 minutes per hour in any case, and then rejoice when the bus actually arrives earlier than anticipated. It will make you happy.
Even before the pandemic, this provision of a meal on board was extremely rare. Only on bus trips of the highest caliber (which are by definition a small percentage) and for trips of more than eight hours would they offer a full meal like you would expect on a plane. More common would be they would hand out cookies or some light snack, and again for only those companies that were flush.
Obviously, drivers know that people need to eat and take breaks. So instead of providing a meal on board, there are some more common practices. One is if the trip is generally more than eight hours, they build into their schedule a stop at a roadside cafeteria for a thirty-minute break for passengers to buy a hot meal and use the restrooms. Bus companies have arrangements with these cafeterias so they get exclusive use of the facilities while the bus is there, no other walk-in customers, which helps keep the passengers safe and the schedule stay on plan.
Another extremely common thing, especially in poorer Latin American countries, is that buses will allow food vendors to board at intersections and walk down the aisle offering homemade goods like empanadas or ice cream, something you don't need a plate or utensils to consume, and then those food vendors get off at the next intersection. This is a win-win, as it helps rural communites have a flow of customer traffic that's very reliable, the bus doesn't need to stop for long cafeteria breaks, and the passengers get to appreciate local cuisine from the countryside.
There is an ancient agricultural principle called risk-spreading that applies here, and you may be familiar with it in some other situations. It stems from the fact that starting your own private bus company to transport people on a route is a fairly straightforward thing to do, and it doesn't require highly advanced college degrees or technical infrastructure. So you will find that most bus companies are actually owned by retired police and military officers who find public or private transportation an easy second career. What this creates is a supply-side economics imbalance where you have more bus companies in a given country or city than you have rider demand.
This oversupply creates the risk of loss if it operates with less than a full bus, so they spread the risk in alianzas or unificados that are basically handshakes between several independent companies where one bus company can take passengers off the hands of another bus company, provided the departures are not more than 30 minutes different and they depart from the same exact bus station. So, if you do an advance reservation or you show up at the bus terminal to ride on a certain carrier, there may be have been a determination that the risk was too high and that carrier has defaulted to their friendly neighbor bus company to inherit the bus passengers. Of course, the favor is then returned in time when the second carrier passes its passengers to the first company.
There is no impact to the ticket price or the destination for disembarkation, it's just a process of redirection to a different gate and crossing out a name on a piece of paper and replacing it with another name. Simple and harmless, but for some it can be a little worrisome until they get used to it.
This is mostly false, and comes from a blend of nostalgia and stereotyping of the "backwardness" of Latin America in general. A century ago when Latin America still was mostly agricultural connected by a network of dirt roads, you had what were commonly referred to as "chicken buses" but more accurate chivas as the public transportation of choice to get farmers to market and industrial workers from the few cities to their family homesteads. Chivas were admired for being colorful but clunky jaloppies of corrugated metal and leaking chassis wobbling down one path, stuffed to the brim with passengers, animals, and bags of grain and potatoes. These also only had slatted wooden seats and open windows to let the breeze pass through the cabin and waft the smell away.
However, chivas largely disappeared by the late twentieth century and are mostly found these days only in a few utmost rural regions. They also are commonly used in cities for slow-moving parties on wheels, kind of like floats in a parade spreading cheer. People love them mostly to recall the old times and their symbolic meaning in Latin American history.
The other instance in which you would find uncomfortable seats is municipal buses, which because rides are so short inside a city, the seats are made of plastic. But even these only account for half the buses, as more municipal buses simply are extensions into a city from a long-distance bus company as it passes through on its way to another city.
Virtually all long-distance buses these days not only have seats that are padded, upholstered and reclining, but curtains on the windows you can slide back and forth to adjust the light, windows you can close and shut, and air-conditioning. This doesn't mean they're all new, like just off the assembly line. They still can be old models and not exactly sparkling clean. But you don't have to worry about your tailbone and back. And most don't allow chickens to share the ride either.
Ridiculously false. While it may not seem so if you are just standing on a city sidewalk and see the roads with plenty of cars (most of them taxis), they are just a tiny percentage compared to how many people use cars in other regions like North America, Europe, or Australia. Further reduce the availablity and use of high-speed transit like bullet trains that are only present in Chile, and what you end up with is the majority of people who still need to get around somehow. To give you a sense of scale, the only country in Latin America that comes even close to the number of registered vehicles per 1,000 that the United States enjoys (893 out of 1,000) is Uruguay at 693 per 1,000, and that is the outlier. Even Chile that I mentioned earlier only has 272 registered vehicles per 1,000 (about 1/3rd of the United States). Cars are much more expensive in Latin America, coupled with lower annual household income, and the lack of viable insurers, adds up to the fact that owning and operating a car has too many disincentives.
As for the incentives, we have the oversupply issue we discussed earlier that keeps just ahead of demand, so you have massive amounts of bus companies that are willing to go anywhere and everywhere to pick up and deliver passengers, even to remote regions, and even right in front of your house if needed and it's along a major arterial. Buses going from city to city are packed with people, sometimes (if you don't get a ticket online) with passengers having to stand in the aisle for hours because bus drivers love going overcapacity if it means keeping their company paying its bills by the end of the day. Residents and visitors alike quickly get accustomed to the reality that a car is just not necessary in Latin America, and even if you don't want to ride a bus to get somewhere, the proxy of getting a private driver to tak you somewhere hours away is commonplace.
This is related to myths #1 and #5. When you walk into the bus station without a ticket, you will undoubtedly as your first step go look at posted schedules on bus company windows, sometimes simply hand-written with a sharpie on construction paper, or on huge flashy and colorful marquees stating departure times to this or that city. It's all marketing hype, and has about a 50% chance of being true. The printed or advertised departures are half the time out of date and they don't have the budget or desire to do any reprinting. Or, the departures are simply and always their best hopes. They hope to leave at the stated time, but only if they get at least half the bus full.
This is why bus companies are selling online more these days, so they can start filling their seats in advance and lower the risk of having to cancel. It's also why you hear two maddening things in every bus terminal. The first one is a lot of bus drivers hollering and begging, tapping their keys on their counters trying to persuade passengers to come to them and get on board, because their bus departure time has open seats which is money left on the table. They really don't care if they're not going exactly to your destination, as long as it's somewhat close they'll give you some half-truths in order to get you on board. The other thing you'll hear which is equally aggravating is a lot of the word "no", or the non-verbal shaking of the finger in a "no" swish. This is for all their published schedules that are not operating, they didn't meet the threshold, and so you're basically told to go away or choose another departure time.
Yet, there's a third phenomenon that ameliorates the first two, which is what I discussed earlier about alliances between bus companies. If you're lucky, one bus company who cannot fulfill a stated departure time will simply make a call over to their allied bus company that is departing at a close enough departure time to the one you wanted that you won't even be bothered by the difference. You will then get directed to the second bus company across the hall or a few windows away, as that second bus company has in fact met the threshold and has enough room left to take you on.
Just separate the two ideas, and you'll be fine. In Latin America, tours are simply referred to as tours and the form of transportation is not something you should mix in. Only in the very largest cities do they have double-decker bus tours, but those are usually international imports made for European and American tastes. It is not a concept carried outside those cities at all. For every other kind of tours, the form of transportation is not the focus of attention of a tour. On a couple occasions, we had foreign tourists who assumed that a bus they would board in one city that goes to another city would have an on-board tour guide and make stops along the way to let passengers take photos and buy souvenirs. That is not at all what "buses" do in Latin America. Tours, referred to as just simply that word alone, will usually describe how they are going to get you to an attraction or experience; the city or town is contextual, and not the attraction.
Conversely, when Latin Americans refer to buses (autobus, autocarro, ônibus, micro), they are referring to a commuting concept, moving passengers and tourists between cities, no tours included. Now, what you will often get as simply a function of the need for breaks and hygiene, is a bus making a stop someplace for passengers to eat and use public restrooms. Sometimes these service stops rely on bus passengers for the majority of their income, and so they will stock up on souvenirs, local delicacies, and be at a stop where there's some good scenery. So you should by all means get off the bus when it takes a service break and look around. They want you to see how they live there.
It varies widely, and there are ways to get a quiet ride. It is true that on coach-class decks (the normal economy fare floor of the bus) in the poorer of countries, there will not only be more passengers than seats, standing in the aisles for hours, and lots of talking back and forth. In Latin America, there are mostly no ordinances that say that passengers have to whisper or keep the noise down. But that's not really the source of the most noise. The largest volume comes from on-board music playing over the speakers, usually festive and rhythmic, making the bus feel like it should be a dance floor. Or, in just as many instances, bus conductors will play a movie on TVs suspended from the ceiling, and 90% of those movies are action flicks starring Steven Segal or Jean Claude Van Damme. Sometimes they are comedies or romantic dramas, and all produced in Hollywood and dubbed in Spanish. Ironically enough, the movies tend to calm the passengers down as they like to watch more than talk, so they end up being something fairly easy to fall asleep to.
In many countries that are more economically developed, you'll be able to mitigate the noise by getting a seat in the VIP cabin. These are more luxury seating, acoustically controlled, and people tend to use earphones for watching movies or music on their portable devices. I've never seen an overhead TV in a VIP cabin or even heard music piped through the sound system. You can upgrade to a VIP seat option during checkout on AndesTransit if there is one available on that bus. Another way to get a quiet ride is simply to take a night bus. Bus drivers never play movies or music at night, and most passengers just want to sleep, and everyone respects that.
Bus culture is different in regions of the world, the same as human culture. It's easy to bring our own assumptions or myths about what buses do or how they work from our own preconceptions based on where we have grown up and learned about transportation where we live. In Latin America, buses are much more integral to social life and the economy, so it takes some adjusting to get used to how pivotal of a role they play and have little to do with tourism (which is a good thing!). Hopefully, you will love learning about the customs and norms on buses in Latin America when you encounter them, and maybe be amused at the myths they challenge. Have a good journey!
Kali Kucera is President of AndesTransit and also known as "the bus guy" for his adventures across South America by bus. He is co-author of "South America Borders" and "365 Days of South American Festivals".
Av. America Sur Nro 2857 (between Alemania and Isabel de Bobadilla streets)
Av. Remigio Crespo 13-33 (between Brasil and Latinoamericana streets)
Av. Elvira Rawson de Dellepiane 144, Puerto Madero Sur, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Av. Granaderos and Hernán Cortes
Avenida de Alarcón, across street from Holiday Inn Aeroporto
Transversal 9 #4N y Carrera 11 Norte, Popayán, Colombia
Avenida Hipólito Yrigoyen 339 and Av. Cornejo Saravia, Salta