Backstory: Travel noir – the Fung Wah 'extreme'

"I read ... about how there were these gang wars among the different bus lines and how ... somebody got shot or something," says Jennifer Schmidt, a regular rider from Brooklyn. "People were like, 'Are you still going to take the Fung Wah bus?' And I was like, 'Yeah, it's cheap.' "

Our four-hour trip earlier this week was efficient and bus-ride dull, which seemed to suit the 30 or so riders, who slept, chatted on cellphones, or sat plugged into iPods. There was a Chinese-American restaurateur from New Hampshire headed down to see suppliers, an elderly woman in a sari, a young Russian couple who boarded on a tip from a stranger, and an Irish tourist who had read about Fung Wah in the Rough Guide.

Riders seemed relaxed, or at least resigned. "Anything can happen to anyone ... anywhere," shrugged the Russian woman, who asks to be identified by her first name, Anastasia.

Tales circulate about hard braking that jolts riders awake, cellphone-gripping drivers, and rugby-scrum queues. But plenty of reported happenings on Fung Wah buses seem to be merely offbeat, even poignant. New Yorker Bianca Shagrin met her husband on a Fung Wah bus on Valentine's Day in 2004. She "liked the twangy Chinese music" on the buses, she writes from her honeymoon. Now she leans toward Greyhound: "slightly (but not always!) more reliable."

Still, tough statistics add gravity. Fung Wah's drivers – as a group – rank in the "worst 2 percent" of drivers nationwide on regulatory violations such as speeding, following too close to other cars, and not keeping proper logs, says Ian Grossman of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Over the past two years, he adds, 71 Fung Wah drivers were inspected and nine were suspended from driving – twice the national average for other bus companies.

But Fung Wah has "always been very receptive to fixing things and meeting federal standards," he says.

The real question for some observers involves the economics of delivering passengers some 220 miles – in vehicles that register single-digit m.p.g. ratings – with all of the attendant costs, for $15, almost hourly and all week long.

"I suspect they're cutting some kinds of corners," says Kip Viscusi, a professor of law, economics, and management at Vanderbilt University and an expert on societal responses to risk. "It's a question of which corners they're cutting."

In a 2004 interview with The New York Times, Fung Wah founder Pei Lin Liang described the staggering hours and high degree of multitasking by employees as "business by suicide."

On Canal St. in New York, Fung Wah customer-service agent Frank Torres herds passengers on the sidewalk. He downplays the Sept. 5 accident: "When you're dealing with public transportation it'll happen. It's not like we take big buses and put taxi drivers in them," he says, echoing Fung Wah statements about driver training.

He describes a recent program in which passengers were given comment cards and 25-cent tokens. The idea: Write down complaints, or, if you're happy with the ride, hand the token to the man behind the wheel. "We had some notes and calls," says Mr. Torres. "And we also had drivers walking away with a lot of change."

• Michael Kanin contributed to this report.

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