Bus vs. Rail in Manhattan

The formerly free-market Manhattan Institute, which has lately become a shill for transit and other big-government subsidies, has taken a stand against spending $10 billion on a bus terminal in New York City. The only problem is that, instead of the bus terminal, the Manhattan Institute proposes to spend multiple tens of billions of dollars on new underground rail transit lines connecting Manhattan with New Jersey.

The Port Authority Midtown Bus Terminal. Photo by Hudconja.

The 1937 opening of the Lincoln Tunnel led to hundreds of buses roaming the streets of Manhattan after bringing commuters and other travelers from New Jersey. To reduce congestion, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey built a midtown bus terminal near the Manhattan entrance of the tunnel in 1950. That terminal cost $24 million, less than $210 million in today’s dollars.

With various expansions, the terminal served as many as 8,000 buses carrying 260,000 passengers a day in 2019. In addition to 65 New Jersey Transit bus routes, the terminal serves well over a dozen private (though sometimes subsidized) commuter and intercity bus companies. But to some the aging facility is “one of Manhattan’s most miserable locales.”

The Port Authority proposes to build an entirely new terminal that will be able to handle 40 percent more passengers (mainly by allowing for larger buses). In order to avoid the expense of taking and clearing nearby private land, the proposal calls for building the new terminal on the same site as the existing one, which will take longer and disrupt bus travelers during construction. While the original terminal was built in less than two years, construction of a new one will take at least eight years and won’t be completed before 2031 at the earliest. A previous proposal was expected to cost $8 billion to $10 billion; this one will probably cost more.

“A bus operation at this scale makes little sense,” observes Manhattan Institute senior fellow Eric Kober in the institute’s City Journal. I can agree with him on that. “No other city of comparable size has such a facility,” Kober adds. Of course, that may be because no other city of comparable size is bordered by a broad river with few crossings, each of which send thousands of buses a day into the city.

“The sensible solution,” according to Kober, “is to scale back dramatically the need for commuter buses by building adequate rail-transit capacity serving the dense communities on the west side of the Hudson that presently dominate bus ridership.” In particular, a Manhattan Institute paper written by Kober in 2018 proposes to extends subways into Bergen and Hudson counties based on the vague idea that these counties “have the density” to support rail transit. Kober doesn’t estimate how much this would cost, but based on cost estimates of other tunnels mentioned in Kober’s report, it would be at least $20 billion. It isn’t clear to me why spending $20 billion is more sensible than spending $10 billion.
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Kober’s report was written before the pandemic, but his article critiquing the bus terminal proposal was written just a couple of weeks ago. Yet neither the Port Authority’s bus terminal proposal nor Kober’s article acknowledges the effects of the pandemic.

Due the pandemic, only about 10 percent of Manhattan offices are actively occupied. So many companies are giving up on their office leases that commercial real estate owners are offering up to a year of free rent to anyone who signs a long-term lease.

A major problem with urban planners is they have a static view of the world that is usually obsolete. To them, downtowns have always been and always should be the preeminent job centers in any city, when in fact American downtowns today only have about 8 percent of urban jobs. Manhattan has the most with about 22 percent of the New York urban area’s jobs located in midtown and downtown. But that was before the pandemic.

Like other planners, Kober sees the problem as one of moving workers into Manhattan. Yet it appears that the pandemic is about to implement a completely different and lower-cost solution, which is to move the jobs out of Manhattan. City planners (with the probable support of people like Kober) will do everything they can to fight such a transition, but they’ve failed in every other city in the United States and will likely fail in Manhattan.

If Manhattan jobs decline, even if only by 10 to 20 percent, then there will be no need for a new bus terminal that can handle 40 percent more passengers and no need for subway lines to New Jersey. If jobs decline by more than 20 percent, there will be no need for a single bus terminal at all.

The whole point of the bus terminal is to relieve congestion by keeping buses off of Manhattan streets. But before the pandemic, nearly 250,000 vehicles per day entered Manhattan from New Jersey, only about 2.5 percent of which were buses through the Lincoln Tunnel that presumably went to the midtown bus terminal. While buses take more road space than cars, if post-pandemic Manhattan jobs decline by just 10 percent, allowing those buses to proceed to some hotel or office building instead of the bus terminal won’t make a net addition to congestion.

We don’t know for sure that Manhattan jobs will decline by 10 percent. But such a decline seems more likely than that they will stay the same or increase by enough to justify a new, larger bus terminal. For this reason, the Port Authority should put expensive bus terminal expansion plans on hold and the Manhattan Institute should stop endorsing even more expensive subway lines to New Jersey.