In my limited experience, it's safe from everything except germs. I go a nasty bug on the last trip. One meets odd characters. On the plus side, I chatted with a songwriter working on lyrics while riding from Spokane to the Tri-Cities of Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland down in the middle of the southern border of Washington State along the Columbia River. On the negative, I spent hours sitting next to a strange man who kept talking in his sleep while riding across the empty midwest somewhere. And then there's the weird. A lot of people leave prison with nothing but a bag of belongings and a bus ticket. We're not talking violent felons here, and a lot of folks whose only "crime" was a vice get screwed over by the US "justice" system.