Bus stations
Los Angeles has no grand bus terminal. Its intercity network lives at Union Station’s Patsaouras Plaza — and in the curbs and parking lots scattered across the basin.
Patsaouras Transit Plaza at Union Station (801 N Vignes St) is the network’s anchor: Greyhound and FlixBus depart from bays 7–8, with arrivals dropping on Alameda Street at the historic station. From here the premium corridor runs to Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Francisco, Sacramento, Fresno, San Ysidro (for the Tijuana crossing) and Yuma — with Metrolink, Amtrak and four Metro rail lines in the same building.
Read your ticket carefully: Greyhound also boards at a separate “FlixBus Lot” across the street at 501 E Cesar E Chavez Ave — passengers get this wrong daily. The other five stops are pure curbside: UCLA at Gayley Ave, West LA at Expo/Sepulveda station, Downey at the mall. There is no terminal building to find; the pin is the destination.
LA’s bus scene is really two: the app-booked national carriers and the Latino cross-border lines (Tufesa, Los Paisanos) running to Tijuana, Mexicali and deep into Mexico from their own storefront stations on Olympic and in East LA. The lot culture is the culture — buy online, screenshot the pin, arrive 15 minutes early, and treat Union Station as the only address where a wrong guess is recoverable.
THE TIO READ
Union Station or bust — that is our LA rule. Book the Vegas run on FlixBus (from $25 when the apps are kind), double-check whether your bay is the plaza or the FlixBus Lot across Cesar Chavez, and budget time: the last mile into Union Station at rush hour is the slowest mile in America. For San Diego, take the train instead — the Pacific Surfliner is the one corridor where LA’s rails beat its buses outright.
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