Where’s the big fix for the Port Authority terminal?
Dana Rubinstein
The video that real estate executive Ryan Nelson produced on a weekday evening last April, after climbing to a rooftop in Midtown West and filming buses crawl by a neighboring parking lot, may be the least exciting movie ever made.
Over the course of 40 minutes, as the sun sank over Manhattan, he documented the progress of a Lakeland bus from who knows where as it went past a parking lot on 36th Street and 10th Avenue on its way to the Port Authority Bus Terminal six blocks north. It moved all of one block.
The Port Authority terminal, the nations largest bus facility, is most famous for its poor aesthetics and general decrepitude: its low ceilings, tiled-bathroom affect, its heat in the summer, its atmosphere so starved of anything resembling human warmth that the plastic trees in the north wings basement actually are a balm to the eye.
But its shortcomings are more profound than all that. In logistical terms, the terminal is way over capacity. It has been since at least 2001, but probably also a good while longer.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/07/8549619/wheres-big-fix-port-authority-terminal