City officials are planning to relocate Philly’s intercity bus terminal yet again, with the goal of establishing a semi-permanent pickup spot and addressing complaints about the lack of indoor waiting space and other passenger amenities.
The terminal for Greyhound and other carriers would move a very short distance this time, from a stretch of Spring Garden Street at Front Street to a parking lot across the street, according to a preliminary proposal from the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Development (OTIS).
To give passengers a protected place to wait for their buses, a modular building with bathrooms and space for 100 people would be installed on a privately owned parking lot next to a Lukoil gas station.
There would also be two ticket offices on the lot, and the pavement would be marked with ten open-air slips for Greyhound, FlixBus, Megabus and Peter Pan buses. The Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) would staff and manage the site.
Jeff Hornstein, president of the Northern Liberties Neighborhood Association (NLNA), said he helped initiate the proposal as an alternative to the current curbside pickup arrangement, which he said was a “disaster” when it was first set up in November.
The site was initially criticized for lacking bathrooms, creating headaches for adjacent businesses, posing major challenges for disabled passengers, disrupting traffic, and other issues. While the city has since installed a bathroom, added signage and made other improvements, Hornstein said it’s still inadequate.
The new plan, which is in an early stage and still subject to change, is “not optimal, and definitely not a long-term solution,” Hornstein said.
But he said he considers it the least bad choice for the neighborhood and passengers “considering the hand of cards we were dealt, that the buses were going to be here for some period of time.”
An Uber nightmare
The station would be the city’s fourth for long-distance bus travelers in less than a year.
After Greyhound shut down its more than 35-year-old station on Filbert Street last July, the bus companies operated for a few months from a stretch of Market Street near Sixth Street in Old City. The city was heavily criticized for relocating the terminal to a site without public bathrooms that saw crowds of passengers waiting on the sidewalk in all weather, in some cases for hours at a time.
In November, the city moved the terminal to Spring Garden Street on the edge of Northern Liberties, which drew similar complaints. One major problem is that most passengers take rideshares to and from the site rather than riding SEPTA to Spring Garden Station, which is on the next block, Hornstein said.
Especially at first, “something like 60, 70% of people were getting dropped off by Ubers, which just caused even more chaos. Uber drivers were just circling around and there was no order,” he said.
The NLNA asked the city to post security people to monitor the sidewalk and manage traffic, and pushed for installation of a bathroom trailer on a nearby street.
Ahead of a planned visit by OTIS officials to last week’s NLNA meeting, it occurred to Hornstein to ask his friend David Grasso, a developer whose family owns the parking lot, if he’d be interested in turning the property into a bus stop. Grasso responded positively, he said.
Grasso could not be reached for comment.
Hornstein said he also contacted Rich Lazer, executive director of the Philadelphia Parking Authority, who has sought to improve the agency’s image and increase its focus on quality-of-life issues since getting the job in November 2022.
Lazer wants the PPA to move into “helping, rather than being seen as the enemy,” Hornstein said. “So I put the two of them together on a Sunday afternoon, and within a couple of days, they had this idea to convert that lot into a sort of open-air structure bus depot.”
A PPA spokesperson referred questions to OTIS. An OTIS spokesperson confirmed the agency had put forward the proposal but did not immediately provide additional comment.
A medium-term solution
Many details of the plan were not available on Monday, such as the cost, whether the city will try to compel bus carriers to help pay for it, and how the PPA plans to handle management of the new terminal.
The PPA has hundreds of employees who operate garages, manage parking meters and permits, and enforce parking rules, but it has not overseen buses or bus stations.
Hornstein, who heads the nonprofit Economy League think tank and previously worked on parking issues in South Philadelphia, said the city and PPA will have to repave the site, build plumbing and electrical infrastructure, install a trailer-like mobile depot and bathrooms, and beautify the site for the benefit of nearby homeowners. They’ll also have to pay to lease the land from Grasso.
“PPA is willing to put in trees, and do the work,” he said. “It’s gonna be a few million bucks, but in the grand scheme of things, it is a very low-cost solution.”
OTIS officials have made clear that their priority is improving the passenger experience, especially for low-income travelers who depend on relatively inexpensive long-distance buses, he said.
Many people have called for building a true bricks-and-mortar bus station near Amtrak’s 30th Street Station or at another location with good access to public transit. But that’s a major project with a long timeline, and officials seemed to be focused on finding a quicker medium-term solution, Hornstein said.
“The city has made it clear that they don’t see this as the final resting place for this operation,” he said. However, “they want this done now, so that the bus companies can get on with what they’re doing and have some predictability and regularity in time for 2026.”
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The city has previously said the bus carriers have permits to operate from the Spring Garden Street curb through the end of this month, but according to a plan summary posted by NLNA, the proposed new bus depot would not open until this summer.
Advocates are surprised and disappointed
Hornstein said NLNA gave advance notice of last week’s meeting via its Facebook page and 3,000-person mailing list. However, OTIS and PPA appear not to have released any information about the plan other than the brief description NLNA posted last week.
The proposal came as a surprise to transit and disabled advocates who previously issued a report on the current pickup area’s poor accessibility, and who have been pushing the city and bus companies to improve conditions there.
“We are elated to see that the mayor is finally taking action on resolving this crisis,” advocate Micah Fiedler said. “A city-controlled terminal can finally give the nearly one million intercity bus riders in Philadelphia a secure space to wait, and this plan is a positive step towards that goal.”
But the group, which includes Disabled in Action, Transit Forward Philadelphia, Philly Transit Riders Union and 5th Square, noted that the proposed depot has some of the same problems as the current pickup area.
Most critically, Spring Garden Station is not accessible to wheelchair users and other people with disabilities, and the new terminal location will require arriving passengers to cross “dangerous” Spring Garden Street to reach the station, they said.
“Until the city can provide solutions to these deficits, we cannot view this as a win for accessibility,” Fiedler said. “Was there not a better location? Could 30th Street, 15th and Vine, or even the old Filbert terminal have taken fewer than nine months of negotiation?”
