On a 90-plus degree day in July, Philadelphian Tina Brock stands under the El on the corner of 2nd and Spring Garden streets, waiting for the Megabus to take her to New York City. An actress, she frequently travels between Philly and NYC for work.
She shades herself under the booming overpass that carries the train while other passengers sit under a nearby grove of trees. There is no roof to shield them from the elements; no chairs set out for them; no water purveyors, or air conditioning, and only temporary restrooms. “On days when it’s really hot or it’s really cold during daylight hours, I’ve just gotten accustomed to it,” Brock says.
It’s been almost a year since Greyhound Lines ended its lease early and closed its bus terminal at 10th and Filbert streets. Now, waiting outdoors is the only option for passengers arriving or departing the city by bus. They’re left exposed to extreme rain and heat, the latter of which can threaten people’s health.
It’s also just plain uncomfortable. Over Memorial Day weekend, my fiancé ended up driving a friend visiting to New York because she had planned to take the bus and it was pouring rain. What should we have done? Make her wait outside?
It doesn’t have to be this way. Other cities have multimodal transportation hubs that house city-to-city bus services and connect riders with local transit services. And Philly already has a great candidate for such a hub: 30th Street Station, which already houses Amtrak, SEPTA regional rail, New Jersey Transit and links to subways, trolleys and local bus routes. Intercity bus providers (Megabus, for example) have operated from there in the past.
Recently, the City received a $90,000 grant from the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission to study the feasibility of 30th Street as an intercity bus terminus — an idea that’s been around since at least 2016, when Amtrak published its 30th Street District Plan. The renovation and modernization of 30th Street is underway, yet we’re still debating whether city-to-city buses will call the station home.
Why is this taking so damn long to figure out?
How Philly dropped the ball on building a multimodal transportation hub
A mix of bad timing, poor leadership and lack of funding led to the current chaos surrounding Philly’s intercity bus stops, which have moved several times since Greyhound shuttered its retail location. Now, City officials are considering moving it again to a third interim spot — this time one that’s indoors and has restrooms.
Part of the issue last year was Greyhound’s decision to give the City only two days’ notice before it used an early termination clause in its lease to exit the Filbert Street location, according to Karen Guss, a spokesperson for the City’s Department of Planning and Development.
Okay, but since the City has been working on a plan for 30th Street Station for 8-or-so years, why didn’t they just relocate there? According to the Inquirer, that plan calls for buses to stop adjacent to the station (which is why Amtrak says it’s not included in the current redevelopment). While many other cities, including Boston and Washington, D.C., have invested in multimodal transportation hubs in recent years, Philly let the issue fester until it became a crisis.
The problem of intercity bus operators closing their retail locations isn’t unique to Philly, yet other cities have found ways to build multimodal transportation hubs.
The City did not respond to questions about why they didn’t act sooner. Councilmember Mark Squilla, whose district covers both the Filbert Street location and the current temporary stop, believes the prior mayoral administration didn’t act because they “knew they wouldn’t be here when [Greyhound closed its terminal] … So I don’t think it was a high priority for them to find a location,” he says. “The easiest thing to do was just allow Greyhound to dictate that they no longer will be using a terminal.”
In some ways, this isn’t surprising. Buses have long been “treated as a second-class mode of transportation,” across the U.S., says Peter J. Pantuso, president and CEO of the American Bus Association. All this, even though intercity buses make around 600 million passenger trips each year and surveys have found that compared to train users, intercity bus riders tend to be women, people from lower incomes, people of color and older adults, the Department of Transportation reports. As I spoke with riders, many of whom were women, they expressed anxiety about arriving or waiting for the bus at night at the current location.
Visit Philadelphia President and CEO Angela Val says about 6 percent of the city’s overnight tourism travel is bus travel, so the mode is predominantly used by city residents to travel to and from other cities. [Editor’s note: Angela Val is a Citizen board member.]
“How we treat our residents is an indication of how we will treat visitors, and it is important that we make sure that our residents have a bus shelter that’s safe, well lit, provides adequate accommodations, such as heat, air conditioning, place to grab a bite [and] places to sit,” Val says.
How other cities have built multimodal transportation hubs
The problem of intercity bus operators closing their retail locations isn’t unique to Philly, yet other cities have found ways to build multimodal transportation hubs. In an email, Guss says, “Stations in D.C., Boston and Atlanta came about through unique circumstances that are specific to local conditions. There is no one path to creating an intercity bus station — Philadelphia must find its own way.”
Transit experts do see commonalities that could apply to Philly. Namely, that such projects require buy-in from multiple stakeholders, need a variety of state, city and federal funds to work and must prioritize riders’ safety and convenience.
Charlotte, North Carolina is building its own multimodal transit hub for both Amtrak and intercity buses. The city started talks around the hub’s creation in the 1990s. In 2015, the state bought land from Greyhound to build a station that can house trains and buses shortly after winning a $25 million TIGER grant from the federal Department of Transportation.
Once completed, the project will link Amtrak and Greyhound to Charlotte’s street car and commuter rail lines. The rail infrastructure is already done; the city is working with a developer to break ground on the terminal. “It’s the convergence of pretty much everything in one area,” says Brian Nadolny, project manager for Gateway Station with the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS). “This vision has been around for 20 years and now it’s finally coming to fruition.”
Charlotte isn’t a perfect comparison for Philly. Notoriously traffic-snarled, the NC city needed the hub for train access, not buses, and creating railway added to project costs. In Charlotte, Greyhound didn’t abandon its physical location with little notice, so planners had time to build a temporary spot. In Philadelphia, connecting Amtrak, local transportation and intercity buses wouldn’t take nearly as long — or be as expensive, since 30th Street is already a train station.
Other cities have multimodal transportation hubs that house city-to-city bus services and connect riders with local transit services. And Philly already has a great candidate for such a hub: 30th Street Station, which already houses Amtrak, SEPTA regional rail, New Jersey Transit and links to subways, trolleys and local bus routes.
Still, there are parallels: Charlotte’s Gateway Station shows what happens when city and state governments and private businesses work together on a multimodal transit hub. Though North Carolina’s Department of Transportation (NC DOT) led the way, Amtrak, Greyhound and CATS have also partnered on the project. That same kind of buy-in will be necessary at 30th Street in Philly, which Amtrak owns, should the City want to build a bus terminal there.
When asked whether Amtrak would be willing to collaborate on the project, Beth Toll, senior public relations manager with Amtrak, says the company is “always open to discuss options to improve mobility and connections with other transportation providers and stakeholders.” She did not, however, respond to questions asking if the company would be willing to contribute to funding the project.
Right now, a lot of the conversation around a potential bus terminal positions the City as solely responsible. They can lead, but they need to work with a lot of different entities — PennDOT, the bus operators, Amtrak — some of whom (including PennDOT, the bus operators, the Philadelphia Parking Authority, and other community stakeholders) are already involved.
“All the pressure shouldn’t rest with the City of Philadelphia,” says Joseph Schwieterman, director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University and an expert in city transit systems. “It should be seen as a regional project.”
How do we fund these projects?
The other lesson we can take from Charlotte is funding, particularly, the need for more than one source of capital to get the project done. Charlotte has used federal, state and city resources to support the Gateway Station project. As private companies, intercity bus operators aren’t eligible to apply for federal transit agency grants that can help fund these projects. They need a public partner.
Taxpayers might feel squeamish about that. The government picking up the bill after private bus companies kick passengers to the curb feels an awful lot like a subsidy. Cities have to think about transit as a public good — and politicians need to pitch it that way to citizens — to get these projects to work. “There’s often a knee-jerk reaction against [the government] helping a private business failing or just padding their profits,” Schwieterman says. “But … bus lines are essentially a transit system. So we need to get past that hang-up.”
There again, Charlotte proves a useful example for Philly. When NC saw increased demand from residents for Amtrak trains between Raleigh and Charlotte, the state began updating all of the stations along that route. Charlotte’s Amtrak station, like Philly’s current intercity bus stop, was away from its downtown, making it hard for riders, especially tourists, to navigate the system. To solve this problem, the city and the state worked together to prioritize the needs of all transit users.
It’s also worth considering how companies can pitch in on these projects. In Charlotte, Nadolny envisions Amtrak and intercity bus operators contributing to the cost of the project through leases and docking fees to use the space. In Philly, Francesca Waldman, public affairs team lead on the government affairs team at Greyhound/FlixBus, says the company would be happy to work with PennDOT and the City to apply for grants and would be willing to “cover reasonable costs associated with the use of such a facility.” Guss says they’re “working with multiple organizations and agencies to determine how the costs will be paid.”
So … where do people wait until then?
Philly has a clear candidate for a multimodal transit hub.There’s council and mayoral interest in the project, per Squilla. Advocacy groups, like Transit Forward Philadelphia, say 30th Street is their current top choice. And Greyhound wants to work with municipal representatives on this, according to Waldman. “We’ve been speaking with the City about what our needs are, what the needs of passengers are and I think they’ve been really receptive,” Waldman says.
So we should have a terminal soon, right?
Guss says there’s no finalized timeline for the feasibility study, but they’ve started and want to complete it ASAP. Squilla expects it will take at least six months. There’s no estimate for when the City might announce a permanent location.
“How we treat our residents is an indication of how we will treat visitors, and it is important that we make sure that our residents have a bus shelter that’s safe, well lit, provides adequate accommodations, such as heat, air conditioning, place to grab a bite [and] places to sit.” — Philadelphia President and CEO Angela Val.
For now, riders will be stuck at a temporary location, which may move again. The City wants to prioritize a safe, clean, indoor waiting area with seating and restrooms, per Guss. They’d also like to find a spot close to accessible, local public transit options and highways, one with in-person ticketing options and proximity to businesses.
The current 2nd and Spring Garden stop doesn’t meet any of these qualifications. The El is nearby, but riders have to climb up a staircase to get there, making it difficult or impossible to access for people in wheelchairs, pushing strollers or with mobility aids. And perhaps it’s not the best public relations move to welcome riders here with a subway overpass and a strip club.
“If you are new to Philadelphia, if you’ve never been here before, … and you come to Spring Garden and Delaware Avenue, and you’re like, Where the hell am I? This doesn’t even look like Philadelphia,” says Connor Descheemaker, coalition manager for Transit Forward Philadelphia. Descheemaker and other volunteers were there passing out water to waiting passengers when I visited the stop on another nearly 90-degree day.
Passengers have some concerns, too, and aren’t universally for a 30th Street solution. The congestion at 2nd and Spring Garden frustrates FlixBus rider Melissa Martin. The North Philadelphian lives near Temple University Hospital and takes the bus to New York at least three times a month to visit her daughter. Martin didn’t mind waiting under the El when there were only a few bus service providers there, but now with Peter Pan, FlixBus, Megabus and Greyhound all dropping off and picking up, it gets overcrowded. (FlixBus owns Greyhound.)
As we talk, three buses from different operators wait by the curb, filling almost the entire space under the overpass. Martin worries relocating all of the buses to 30th Street could have the same issues, though she agrees it would be nice to have shelter from the weather.
“If they could get all of the buses not in the same spot, if they could spread it out, that would be very good,” she says.
In both Charlotte and Atlanta, bus passengers were able to use a temporary site near the multimodal transit hub mid-construction. That could be an option at 30th Street, too. Buses have picked up and dropped off passengers near there before.
Squilla has also heard talk of moving the temporary stop to the Roundhouse (the City’s former police station at 7th and Race streets), or the S. 2nd Street Auto Park, a garage in Old City. (City officials recently walked out of a meeting where parents came to express concerns about the Old City location because the press was there, the Inquirer reported.)
Wherever the hub goes, Squilla believes the City needs to release a permanent plan before changing the interim location. That way, riders can feel assured that the temporary spot won’t become forever. Guss said they hope to release that plan and the new interim one at the same time. “It can’t take forever,” Squilla says.
