Port Authority bus terminal work could start in ’24

Construction on a new $10 billion Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan could begin at the end of this year — the long-awaited start of a project to reconstruct a 73-year-old facility that was deemed obsolete in 2014.

While the Port Authority plans to pay for the majority of construction costs, it is also seeking a $1 billion loan from the FTA and hopes to develop payment-inlieu-of-taxes agreements with the city to build two towers of commercial space that will help finance the project, to the tune of about $2.5 billion.

The Manhattan bus terminal is the nation’s largest and the world’s busiest, according to the agency. Individual carriers, the largest of which is NJ Transit, serve routes for daily commuters throughout New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and the lower Hudson Valley, and provide intercity services to and from locations such as upstate New York, New England, the Mid-Atlantic and Canada. More than 190,000 passengers use the existing bus terminal daily.

The need for a completely new building has become apparent in recent years. Commuters snake around escalators and hallways while queueing for buses. Buses have to do laps around the building until gates open during rush hours. And the facility has a dreary, fortress-like design that makes it unattractive in the neighborhood.

But getting to this point has been rocky. The bus terminal was left out of the bistate agency’s capital plan in the years after it was deemed obsolete. It was also not a priority project for former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who tried to stall or limit funding for the terminal during his time in office.

In 2017, the agency dedicated $3.5 billion to the project in its 10-year capital plan, with officials saying then that they would “find a way to finish it” after that investment helped get shovels in the ground.

In 2019, the Port Authority revealed three options under consideration to expand and redesign the bus terminal, which were narrowed to one modified plan in 2021.

In August 2022, A. Epstein & Sons International and Foster+Partners were hired by the Port Authority to design and engineer a way to execute this plan, which is estimated to cost between $7.5 billion and $10 billion. Construction was supposed to have started before 2024 and at that time was expected to be fully complete in 2031.

Just weeks before the design firms were hired, the Port Authority approved spending some $28 million to support aging concrete trusses, plus more cleaning, repairs and inspections.