One by one, parents and community members went before a packed crowd in the basement of an Old City daycare center Tuesday to decry the potential harms from a proposed intercity bus station in their neighborhood.
“With the garage for these buses being literally next door to this preschool, you will be directly impacting the safety of those attending this preschool and increasing their risk of serious injury from motor vehicles,” said Marie Carrillo, a CHOP pediatrician whose 3-year-old attends Amigos Spanish Immersion Preschool on 2nd Street.
A parent named Brian said he used to walk past a bus terminal in Newark every day. “I can unequivocally say that a Greyhound station is a bad neighbor,” he said. “I saw things I wish I could unsee. I heard things that I wish I could unhear. I would not want that for any adult, let alone a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5-year-old.”
The Parker administration is considering relocating the city’s temporary bus terminal from its current location along the Spring Garden Street curb in Northern Liberties, which has been criticized for lacking shelter and other amenities, to the Philadelphia Parking Authority garage on 2nd Street.
But several people said it was hard to see how more than 70 buses a day could navigate their way down a narrow, sometimes congested street in Old City’s Historic District, in addition to existing SEPTA buses and the rideshare drivers and other vehicles that would service bus riders.
“We live in an area that depends on some ability to kind of casually walk through history, to see where America came from, see what America’s stories are,” said Tom Loder, chair of the Christ Church Preservation Trust. “You shouldn’t have to fight buses. You shouldn’t have to worry for your safety. You’re talking about two different, very different, constituencies.”
“This isn’t a class battle,” said another neighbor, who declined to give his name. “This is a legitimate concern about a neighborhood that’s trying to preserve its character, its decency, its safety.”
Terminal unlikely to relocate soon
After Greyhound shut down its longtime bus station building on Filbert Street last year, carriers including Megabus, Flixbus and Peter Pan shifted to picking up passengers on the Market Street curb near 6th Street.
That location had no shelter or bathrooms, disrupted SEPTA bus traffic, and drew complaints from neighboring businesses. The city’s Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems (OTIS) relocated the terminal to the current Spring Garden Street location, which has similar problems as well as accessibility issues, and it has since been looking to move the facility again.
Neighbors of the 2nd Street garage got wind of the proposed relocation in April, when they saw carriers running buses into the garage to test its feasibility and immediately organized to oppose it.
More than 100 people attended the meeting Tuesday afternoon, which also drew crews from local TV and radio stations and representatives of state Sen. Nikil Saval and state Rep. Mary Isaacson’s office, according to event organizers.
Councilmember Mark Squilla attended and spoke, but officials invited from OTIS turned around and left when they saw the crowd.
“We were invited to come to a parent meeting that wasn’t a media event,” Sharon Gallagher, spokesperson for the Managing Director’s Office, told a scrum of reporters. “We were coming to talk to parents this evening, and we didn’t know that the entire public was invited.”
Squilla said he expected the city would schedule a new meeting with Amigos parents at a future date. Officials are also expected to discuss the bus station at an Old City District meeting on July 17 and a community meeting in Society Hill on July 24.
OTIS officials have said previously that they would like to move the bus terminal away from Spring Garden Street by September, if possible, but Squilla said it now appears unlikely that it could be relocated to 2nd Street that quickly.
The parking garage is operated by the PPA but owned by the National Park Service, which requires a traffic study and a community impact study before it can evaluate whether to allow the site to be used as a bus station, he said. The city will have to commission consultants to do those studies.
“That timeline maybe was dictated not realizing they would have to do those research studies,” Squilla said. “Maybe that changes their focus to another location. Maybe they go through these studies to learn what the best location is.”
Varying opinions on the need for a move
Some of those who argued that Old City was the wrong place for even a temporary bus terminal said they nonetheless supported mass transit and agreed that the city needs to create a proper indoor bus station, perhaps near Amtrak’s 30th Street Station.
One exception was resident James Timmins, who said he takes Megabuses from the Spring Garden Street terminal, which is partly sheltered by I-95, to New York. He described the terminal as far preferable to the Megabus dropoff in Manhattan, which consists of an unsheltered vacant lot.
Philly’s terminal “is under an overpass, it’s fine, it’s protected, and it’s a better facility than New York City,” he said. “So what in the world are you guys thinking about, moving it next to this school?”
However, transit advocates maintain that the Spring Garden site is unacceptable and the terminal needs to be relocated.
Nicole Brunet, policy director at the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, attended the meeting at Amigos. As it wound up, she said she heard neighbors’ concerns and was aware of the area’s traffic problems, but still thought 2nd Street was a good option.
“It’s off the curb, it provides bathrooms, it’s closer to a stop on the El that is actually wheelchair accessible,” she said, referring to the subway stop at 2nd and Market. “You’re also dropped off in a place where you want to be. I think that a lot of people use intercity buses to come to Philadelphia to see the history.”
She also rejected the argument, made by some speakers, that putting the terminal there would harm local businesses or reduce the benefits from a number of nearby development projects, such as the $329 million project now underway to cap a nearby section of I-95 and build a park and other amenities.
“30th Street would be a great location,” she said, “but inherently, a bus stop doesn’t mean your neighborhood’s going to go down in value.”
