The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are promising Jersey commuters a new bus terminal on Manhattan’s West Side. When the people on Manhattan’s West Side learned about this done deal, they were a little upset. The urban vs. suburban smackdown could delay the project for years.
The Port Authority says the old bus terminal is too old and too small. A decade ago, 59.2 million people came through the Port Authority every year on buses; now, it’s 66.7 million.
“It’s easy to deride West Siders as NIMBY-ists. But in a democracy, you have some say about what happens around where you live and work. ”
The Port expects to absorb another 67,000 passengers every day by 2040, and a 50 percent increase in rush-hour traffic, from 600 buses an hour.
Today’s modern buses may hold more people, but they don’t fit in the 66-year old terminal. Plus, it’s falling apart, and could become dangerous in 15 years.
Building a bus terminal seems easy. It’s just a building.
But it wasn’t easy the first time: it took from 1939 to 1951 to plan and build the initial building, smaller than today’s, for about $220 million in today’s dollars.
This time, it’s supposed to take 15 years, and cost $10.5 billion.
And that’s if things go well — which they probably won’t.
The Port Authority cannot stop bus traffic while it builds a new terminal, so it probably needs to build a temporary terminal in the meantime. And that temporary terminal needs to be somewhere near the tunnels that bring buses in from Jersey.
But “temporary” means a long time — a decade to build, use and demolish this “short-term facility.” Plus, it’ll need more space for its permanent, bigger terminal.
Walk around Manhattan’s West Side and see if you see any big, open spaces where a bigger bus terminal, temporary or permanent, could go. The Port Authority already takes up two entire blocks of Eighth Avenue, and goes west to Ninth. It has hinted it could seize land along Ninth Avenue, and as far as Eleventh.
But Ninth Avenue in the 40s is peppered with decades-old small businesses, from pizza shops to fish and meat and spice markets to a bakery that moved west after it lost its first shop to the first bus terminal.
Also, people live there — and not rich people. The West Side is still home to thousands of lower-income and middle-income people who live in old six- to seven-story buildings, some owners, some renters.
At least 350 of them came out to the Port Authority’s first meeting on this topic, and they were nervous — people who live in a “footprint” always are — but determined.
They also have backup from their politicians.
Councilman Corey Johnson promised he’d never let the Port Authority use eminent domain — while the Port only said it would “minimize” seizures. Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer said residents could delay construction in court, ensuring “your project will never happen.”
It’s easy to deride West Siders as NIMBY-ists. But in a democracy, you have some say about what happens around where you live and work. And, as one neighborhood resident predicted at the meeting, the Port will target individual property owners who can’t defend themselves, not huge, politically connected developers.
After all, the city has been building an entire neighborhood, Hudson Yards, nearby, without New York and New Jersey thinking it would be a good idea, maybe, to integrate bus or rail into new construction before many people were living there.
And there’s a competing idea: Build a bus terminal in New Jersey, and build a rail link from New Jersey into Manhattan. But the Port has promised New Jersey lawmakers that it won’t do that, because New Jersey residents prefer their one-seat ride.
That, too, is a perfectly fair concern: Bad commutes harm people’s quality of life. But there’s also a limit to how monolithic the West Side can become as it absorbs an entire region’s growth.
As Christine Berthet, a West Side resident, said last week, it will come down not to good planning, but to whose politicians are stronger: New Jersey’s or New York’s.
The West Side helped make Bill de Blasio mayor, forsaking neighborhood Councilwoman Christine Quinn, in part because voters were unhappy with uncontrolled construction.
They can help make him not the mayor, too.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post
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Photo by Spencer Platt / Getty
This piece originally appeared in New York Post