The Port Authority has eliminated several alternatives, including the construction of the new terminal under the old one, under the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center or in New Jersey.
“They created a much better plan than the original,” said Thomas K. Wright, chief executive of the Regional Plan Association, an influential planning group.
Mr. Wright said that replacing the terminal is a necessity, no matter how much it costs, due to the integral role it plays in the daily commute to the city. More than 250,000 people went through it on a typical weekday before the pandemic, according to the Port Authority. Since March, that traffic has dropped more than 65 percent.
“New York ceases to exist without its connections to neighboring communities and the workforce,” said Wright. “Without it, the city is in a period of decline.”
The bus terminal, a brick hull perched at the mouth of the Lincoln tunnel, has long exceeded its capacity – when it opened in the late 1950s, it was expected to receive 60,000 passengers a day. Although the station was rehabilitated in the early 1980s, it cannot accommodate the crowd of passengers mainly from New Jersey who use it in normal times.
The Port Authority wants the new terminal to have a capacity of 1,000 buses during the peak hours of the night, against about 850 today. It would also be designed to provide charging equipment for electric buses, according to the plan.
Buses may be less romantic than trains, but other major cities have invested in their bus transit systems to help ease traffic and car pollution. More than a dozen American cities, including San Francisco, Denver and Raleigh, NC, have moved in the past decade to build new bus stations or create multimodal transit centers that bring together bus and rail services, said Joseph P. Schwieterman, professor of public service at DePaul University in Chicago.