Escape to the Hamptons, by Jitney, Train or Copter SUMMER ESCAPE Passengers lined up for the 3:30 p.m. Hampton Jitney on 86th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues in Manhattan last week. The Jitney has two classes of service: the regular Jitney and the more expensive Ambassador, which provides wine with snacks. GEORGE PLIMPTON, who died in 2003, once joked that he had written a book and a half aboard the Hampton Jitney, the privately owned bus service that chauffeurs Hamptonites who do not have their own town cars or helicopters to their weekend escapes. The math is no prettier now. On a recent Friday afternoon, the ride from the Upper East Side to East Hampton took 4 hours 14 minutes. That works out to an average speed of 24.7 miles an hour. The Jitneys COST FROM MANHATTAN $30 one way, $53 round-trip for the regular Jitney; $45 one way, $80 round-trip for the Ambassador. Lower priced "value packs" available. SCHEDULED TRAVEL TIME 3 hours 20 minutes during rush hour; three hours at other times from the Upper East Side to East Hampton. SCENE Orderly (mostly). Quiet (no phone conversations over three minutes). Lots of iPads. ADVANTAGES Frequent service. No partyers. Takes reservations. DISADVANTAGES You get there via the Long Island Expressway. It is safe to say that the song "Magic Bus" by the Who - "Goes like thunder/It's a bus-age wonder" - rarely comes to mind on the Jitney. Still, the bus is such a fact of life in the Hamptons that Hamptonites swap Jitney stories at cocktail parties when the conversation lags: about catching it, about getting a good seat, about buying "value packs" of discounted tickets in the winter. They wonder: Will the bottled water served onboard be cold enough? Will the air-conditioning be too cold? It is not the Jitney's fault when the Long Island Expressway is a parking lot, and the Jitney tries its traffic-beating best. It has 50 buses in its fleet and 200 employees on its payroll, 70 of them drivers, but it leases additional buses in the summer. At the busiest times - Friday afternoons in Manhattan, Sunday nights in the Hamptons - it posts coordinators at its stops to see that passengers have reservations and do not board the wrong bus. This summer, it brought in 17 college students from Bulgaria as onboard attendants under a work-exchange program. The drivers keep in touch with hands-free, push-to-talk cellphones, warning of snarls the way airline pilots warn one another about choppy air. "The drivers know of every allowable shortcut and detour between Montauk and the Midtown Tunnel," said Nina Bracovic, the Jitney's marketing manager. Customers often never know that they have avoided extensive delays. This is the Hamptons, so the Jitney has two classes of service: the regular Jitney and the more expensive Ambassador. The Ambassador's buses are configured to carry fewer passengers, like the buses of the rival Hampton Luxury Liner. The Ambassador has its fans. They say the seats are more comfortable than those on the regular Jitney. They like that for an additional $5, they can reserve a particular seat. (On the regular Jitney, a reservation guarantees only a seat on the bus. If it is almost full when you board, you may end up in the seat by the restroom.) The Ambassador also provides something more than water with snacks: wine. "They should hand out Xanax," said Julia Kirchhausen, a communications consultant, after taking the Ambassador on a Friday afternoon. She said she had been sandwiched between two women whom the attendant recognized as regular passengers. One woman asked for two snacks. The attendant said no. The woman asked for two newspapers: The New York Times and Dan's Papers. The attendant said she could have one or the other, not both. "That was the woman in front of me," Ms. Kirchhausen said. "The woman in back of me was quiet for a little while, then says to the woman next to her, "So what do you do?" The woman says, "Real estate." That's all the woman in back of me needed: "Oh, so my husband was thinking about buying on the Upper West Side. Do you think that's a good idea? What about the East Side? She talked nonstop. Still, some Hamptons weekenders risk the too-chatty seatmate. To get there, do I take the train and deal with the drunk 22-year-olds? Alston Calabrese, 30, said as her Friday-afternoon Jitney pulled into the high-occupancy-vehicle lane on the Long Island Expressway. A moment later, a Hamptons-bound friend who was on the Long Island Rail Road sent her a text message describing the scene on the train: "Aggressive drinking." That seems to be a problem the Jitney does not have: Ms. Bracovic said there was a strict no-alcohol policy (except presumably for the wine on the Ambassador). Another rule prohibits cellphone conversations longer than three minutes, and Ms. Bracovic said the rise of sending texts had meant fewer infractions. So most of the time, the atmosphere is subdued, and the ride is almost library-quiet. Drivers threaten to stop and make unruly passengers leave the bus, even on the expressway - and even if they have to call the police, as was apparently the case last month in an episode captured in a cellphone video that was posted on the real-estate Web site Curbed Hamptons. It was not clear from the video how the trouble started, but a woman in the front of the bus was arguing with the attendant and with other passengers. A man in the back tried to get the other passengers to chant: "Get off! Get off! Still, Barbara Sloan, a real-estate agent from Southampton who was waiting for the Jitney on Lexington Avenue at 59th Street, said it was "the only reasonable form of transportation if you don't want to drive." Like so many others in the Hamptons, though, she had a Jitney story. "I had a closing," she said, "and a very large check to take out" - entrusted to her by a buyer who was not going to the closing - "and attorneys waiting in Southampton." And, she said, a Jitney that did not come. And did not come. "I had to call the man who was buying the house, whose check I was carrying," she said. He called a car service to take her to the East End. The lawyers delayed the closing for 90 minutes until Ms. Sloan arrived with the check. It was, she said, a seven-figure check. "I was tempted not to go at all," she said. I could have bought my own Jitney.