The current Port Terminal of the Port Authority, despised by travelers and ridiculed by comedians, has a demolition date to be replaced by a shiny, state-of-the-art structure.
Port Authority officials unveiled a final scope plan on Thursday for a ground replacement that would include a five-story bus terminal, an approximately 1 million square foot bus storage and an intermediate building between 9th and 10th avenues, and a larger set of ramps directly to and from the Lincoln Tunnel, to be opened between 2030 and 2031.
The new terminal project also includes infrastructure for the future construction of four towers in parts of the new bus terminal that could help finance it, through the sale of air rights and the payment of taxes shared by the city with the authority. Federal funding could also be sought. No prices were informed during the presentation.
“This is by far the best plan the Port Authority has received,” said Rick Cotton, executive director, after outlining the plan and its history. “We believe that it will receive support from bus passengers, from neighbors. It fulfilled all public policy objectives and treated them with sophistication ”.
The replacement terminal, storage building and ramp structure would be built entirely on the Port Authority’s land, addressing concerns of close neighbors that their properties would be condemned to the bus terminal. The plan also removes intercity buses from city streets and addresses rush hour traffic and pollution problems caused by city buses, Cotton said.
The 2 million square foot main terminal will have five floors with more than 160 bus gates and better internal circulation to avoid congestion, said Steve Plate, director of major capital projects at the Port Authority. The storage building and bus stage will be an advance, with charging infrastructure for electric buses, he said.
“It is truly a world-class facility,” said Plate. “We are going to make this installation the best it can be … it will be a model for other people in the world.”
The plan replaces the “built on site” plan that would have added two floors to the existing terminal that has been studied and adjusted since it was first launched in 2017.
Instead, the plan adds the construction of a four-story bus storage and storage building, which will be used as a temporary bus terminal while the current terminal building on 8th Avenue is demolished and replaced, Platt said. Buses will be parked there after the morning rush hour, instead of returning to New Jersey until the evening rush, which should reduce delays.
Passengers using the bus terminal can also breathe easy, so close two competing plans to move the bus terminal to the Javits Center, criticized for being blocks away from the 12 subway lines they can access from the existing bus terminal. .
“The feedback could not have been more clear. The locations on 11th Avenue were objected to by bus users and the community, ”said Cotton. “It was not close to the subway and the community feared the force of thousands of passengers to walk around the neighborhood.”
The neighborhood will also gain two parks converted to bus parking lots, totaling 3.5 hectares.
Pre-COVID-19 studies predict that an additional 30,000 bus passengers would use the terminal in the years 2025-2026. Since the pandemic, the number of NJ Transit bus journeys is only 35% of pre-coronavirus levels and interstate bus journeys have been slower to recover than the use of local buses.
While a new travel study is likely to be done as part of a federal environmental review process, the replacement will still meet a 2040 forecast of a 30% increase in capacity for the 260,000 daily passengers they used before the pandemic, Cotton said.
With the release of the final scope definition document, the authorities asked the Federal Transit Administration to begin the final environmental assessment. In the meantime, the official will do “an intense project and preliminary engineering work,” said Plate. “We want to find a way to build more quickly with minimal disruption.”
The effort to replace the old bus terminal, which is mocked as an unworthy gateway to New York City, began in 2014. State Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, D-Bergen, took the then President of the Authority Port John Degnan on a bus ride to the terminal that year, to show him the conditions that passengers dealt with daily.
Degnan commissioned a $ 90 million repair project to address the most urgent problems at the bus terminals while the Authority was studying the possible replacement of the building.
“I am pleased to see the Port Authority moving forward with the construction of an expanded bus terminal at the current location, where New Jersey passengers will continue to have easy access to the many subway and bus lines that run along Eighth Avenue,” said Weinberg. “New Jersey spoke with a united, bipartisan voice, and we had to fight hard to put the Port Authority’s new Bus Terminal into the current 10-year Capital Plan.”
The debate included a design contest that the authority held in 2016 for a new bus terminal. None of the five finalists were declared “winner” of the contest by the authority, although one resulted in the option to transfer the bus terminal to the basement of the Javits Center.
The replacement of the bus terminal was involved in bi-state politics with Commissioners of the Authority appointed by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, characterizing the project as a benefit for New Jersey. Last week, Cuomo added a replacement bus terminal to his address in the state.
Finally, Weinberg and New York Congressman Jerold Nadler co-chaired the Bi-state Port Authority Highway Terminal Working Group for the past four years.
“This has been our preferred option as it maintains a one-seat trip for New Jersey passengers, while preserving convenient access to local subway and bus lines,” said state senator Tom Kean Jr., R-Union, who he was also in the working group.
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Larry Higgs can be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com.