The latest incarnation of Philadelphia’s intercity bus stop area is drawing decidedly mixed reviews.
On one hand, relocating the pickup and drop-off area for Greyhound, Peter Pan, Megabus, and FlixBus passengers ended complaints about the previous site along Market Street near 6th Street in Old City. It lacked any indoor waiting area or bathrooms, displaced a SEPTA bus stop, and caused disruptions for nearby offices and shops.
By comparison, the new site along Spring Garden Street near Front Street arguably has a number of advantages.
“On paper, the spot they chose seems logical – right next to an El stop on a wide boulevard, not a lot of pedestrian foot traffic, not a lot of residential density (yet) relative to the rest of Northern Liberties,” said Jeff Hornstein, president of the Northern Liberties Neighborhood Organization, in an email.
On the other hand, it’s created headaches for adjacent businesses, is challenging for disabled passengers to navigate, and offers waiting passengers a bleak landscape of parking lots, a dark highway overpass, and the constant roar of traffic on I-95 overhead. A month after the relocation, a promised bathroom facility has yet to materialize.
“It’s stupid,” said James Kitty, who was waiting for a bus home to Connecticut on a recent morning after visiting his sister in New Jersey. “They need to have it where there’s an actual building, for security. After dark, in a big town, you never know what’s going to happen.”
Kitty had put his suitcase on the curb of some strip mall landscaping and was using it as a seat. “There’s nowhere to use the bathroom. There’s nowhere to get something to drink. There’s nowhere [to go] if it’s raining or snowing,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”
City officials say they’ve taken steps to make the bus zone more hospitable and less disruptive. They note that 16 indoor seats are actually available at a Greyhound ticket office on the next block, near Delaware Avenue — although passengers waiting on the sidewalk last week seemed unaware of it.
Police officers and street ambassadors are on hand from mid-day through the late evening to manage traffic and maintain safety, and planning is underway to install weather-appropriate bathrooms later this month, said Matthew Cassidy, a spokesperson for the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, & Sustainability (OTIS).
More improvements are in the works, like better bus company signage and possible streetlighting improvements. But the prospect of Spring Garden remaining the municipal bus terminal for the foreseeable future, and the failure to create a proper main bus station like other big cities have, remains a sore spot for travelers, business owners, and residents of the area.
“It just was poor planning. Philadelphia’s too great of a city to not have the wherewithal to make it safe for everyone,” said Sherrie Terrill-Loman, one of the owners of Delilah’s, a gentleman’s club in the mall. “It’s not safe for no one — our customers, the buses, the people catching buses. Everybody flounders on this.”
Re-relocating in a hurry
The repeated relocation of the city’s intercity bus terminal was sparked by Greyhound’s June shutdown of its bus station building on Filbert Street next to Reading Terminal, which it had occupied for more than 35 years.
The company was responding to growing competition from smaller carriers like Megabus, which for years have kept their costs and ticket prices low by picking up passengers curbside and not paying to use a bus station. Greyhound reportedly began abandoning its terminals around the country after it was purchased by FlixBus in 2021.
The company refused the city Streets Department’s offer to develop a bus terminal in a building near 30th Street Station, because of the cost, and the city did not use its authority to deny the company permission to pick up passengers on the street, the Inquirer reported.
Greyhound moved to a stretch of Market Street near Independence Mall that the smaller carriers were already using. Concerns mounted about the lack of amenities and passengers crowding the sidewalk, including in front of the federal courthouse across the street.
That led OTIS to hurriedly move all the bus pickups to Spring Garden on Nov. 16 with little notice to area businesses and residents.
“We were taken by surprise by the city’s decision to drop the (very makeshift) bus ’depot’ in Northern Liberties,” Hornstein said. “We had a few days’ advance warning, conveyed by the press.”
Losing customers to the chaos
The new bus zone had an immediate impact on the strip mall at the corner of Spring Garden and Front streets, which includes Delilah’s, an Enterprise car rental, a dry cleaner, and some shuttered storefronts as well as a large parking lot.
People waiting for their rides sometimes camp out on parking spots or the landscaping, or on the covered walkway in front of the stores, said Julia Tashchuk, operations manager at Any Garment Cleaners, the shop closest to the street. Some brush their teeth, change their clothes, or leave behind trash or luggage.
“I guess the city didn’t think it through too much,” she said. “People, when it gets cold and it’s raining, they don’t have any cover, so they’re forced to line up along the plaza, which blocks our customers getting in and disrupts our business. It’s been a challenge to say the least.”
People try to come inside the shop to get warm, use the bathroom, or buy bus tickets, she said. Homeless people try to scam bus riders by saying they lost their ticket and asking for money.
“It just attracts the crowd that we wouldn’t want to have here,” Tashchuk said. “We had to hire a security team. We didn’t have that before. So that’s an extra expense.”
Some customers have been staying away from Delilah’s and the other businesses due in part to the waiting passengers and buses blocking the parking lot entrances, said Terrill-Loman, who said she’s with Kentisbury Properties, the mall owner. She’s also listed in public records as one of the owners of Delilah’s.
“It interferes with every single business,” she said. “To some people it’s a deterrent. They don’t want all this chaos. We’re losing our numbers because of the chaos that’s at the entrance.”
The parking lot situation is “pretty untenable” for the businesses, as there’s a constant stream of Ubers dropping off bus patrons and blocking the driveways, said Hornstein, the NLNA president. When he rented a car at Enterprise recently, one of the company’s dedicated parking spots was filled with people waiting for buses, he said.
Hornstein said OTIS has made some important incremental improvements. Security personnel wear vests labeled “ambassador” rather than “security,” they monitor traffic and behavior on the site, and the city is addressing the lighting, signage, and restroom issues, he said. NLNA monitors also check the site periodically.
OTIS has committed “to ongoing dialogue with NLNA and the carriers to solve problems in real time,” he said. “Despite the fact that we were (unpleasantly) surprised by the imposition, it seems like the city is committed to making this ’temporary’ situation as bearable as possible.”
“I’ve seen worse”
On a relatively sunny morning last week, some riders waiting on the Spring Garden sidewalk said they thought the bus zone was fine.
Moments after she stepped off a FlixBus from New York, Sasha Berezovska was calling an Uber on her phone and said she was on her way to a modeling shoot in Philly.
A Ukrainian refugee who lives in Austin, Texas, she said the Spring Garden bus area looked “pretty much the same” as the street where she got on her bus, and better than some actual stations.
“I saw worse kind of bus stations. It’s not that bad,” she said. “I’ve been to the Dallas one, and New York — it’s more scary.”
New Yorker Grantley Charles said he was “enjoying the view” and getting to know the Philly region as he waited with his sister for a ride to Camden. But he said the Spring Garden stop might not be acceptable when it’s cold out or after dark.
“It’s not a station, just a pull-up and get off, so I don’t know how safe it is. If they do [drop you off] at nighttime, it’s another story,” he said. “It’s not going to be good. They might even lose customers over that.”
A group of disability advocates has severely criticized the bus zone. A report put out by Disabled in Action, Philly Transit Riders Union, Transit Forward Philadelphia, and 5th Square found an “astonishing” variety of deficits, including a lack of bathrooms and drinking water, no one to help wheelchair users board buses, and a lack of signage designed for people with vision issues.
Spring Garden Street is especially windy because of the nearby Delaware River and surrounding tall buildings, may have poor air quality due to the highway and road traffic, and is “overwhelmingly loud,” which “presents a real difficulty for those with audio disabilities and sensitivities,” the group found during a site visit.
The Greyhound ticket office is only open 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., it doesn’t have an automatic door opener, there’s no public address system or a lower, wheelchair-friendly ticketing window, and food and drink aren’t permitted, they said. While there were more than 100 people waiting for buses on the sidewalk, the office only has 16 seats.
The advocates also noted problems with accessibility to the Megabus pickup area on the north side of the street, and the lack of an elevator or a sufficiently wide escalator at the nearby Spring Garden Market-Frankford Line SEPTA subway station, among other issues. Noble Street, where the city is planning to build restrooms, is paved with cobblestones, making it inaccessible to wheelchair users.
“The reviewers urge OTIS, the intercity bus carriers, and the City of Philadelphia to fix these issues with expediency,” the group wrote.
Here for the long haul
The city has responded to concerns from riders and business owners and will make more changes, Cassidy said.
The Streets Department paved part of Noble Street and directed bus companies to use it as a layover area rather than blocking mall entrances, he said. The agency has made sure streetlights under the I-95 overpass are working, changed signs on Spring Garden to indicate parking is bus-only, and is in the process of making “more robust signage” on sidewalks to direct buses and passengers.
Police are at the site from 11 am. to 11 p.m. and crime has not increased, Cassidy said.
He noted that federal regulations do not mandate that bus carriers provide restroom facilities, but the city is requiring them and further stipulated that they must be “functional through the cold season.” That required “a change in equipment and multiple permits,” which has apparently delayed their installation.
City officials acknowledge concerns over disabled access to the subway, but they feel that the ADA-compliant Route 5 bus line that connects the site to several SEPTA stations “provides a decent alternative,” Cassidy said. The 25, 43, and 57 buses also stop next to the bus zone. The disability advocacy group has called for signage with more extensive transit information.
Transit advocates and commentators have mentioned a few potential sites for a permanent intercity bus terminal, such as JFK Boulevard near Amtrak’s 30th Street Station or the vacant Roundhouse building, the city’s former police headquarters at 7th and Race street.
Hornstein, who is also executive director of the Economy League of Philadelphia, suggested the city rent an underutilized nearby parking lot for use as a bus stop while it works on developing Philly’s version of New York’s Port Authority bus terminal.
The bus carriers have a permit to use Spring Garden through the end of March, which could be extended further. Cassidy said he could not comment on when or where a permanent station might be established, given “the level of planning and coordination required.”
“The city continues to refine its options for off-street bus loading that meets the criteria of availability as well as proximity to transit and the regional expressway system,” he said. “Several factors in identifying this site are beyond the city’s direct control and involve working with multiple partners.”
The article has been updated to correct the location of the Greyhound ticket office.
