{"id":182808,"date":"2026-05-03T12:02:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-03T12:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/182808\/"},"modified":"2026-05-03T12:02:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-03T12:02:18","slug":"philly-travelers-cheer-reopening-of-intercity-bus-station-mostly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/182808\/","title":{"rendered":"Philly travelers cheer reopening of intercity bus station, mostly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Love Philly? So do we. Let\u2019s be friends.\u00a0Sign up for the Billy Penn newsletter today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As a frequent rider of Greyhound and Flixbus buses to visit his family in northern New Jersey, Temple University senior Chris Herald was among the many people pleased by the reopening of Philadelphia\u2019s main intercity bus station<\/a> on Friday.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt looks really nice, smells new, and, you know, the staff are helpful,\u201d he said, as he sat in one of the new chairs recently installed in the terminal\u2019s light-filled waiting area. \u201cSo it\u2019s a very good situation for the city.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks to extensive renovations by the Philadelphia Parking Authority, which now operates the station<\/a>, he said the facility on Filbert Street near Chinatown no longer feels \u201ctorn down,\u201d as it did before Greyhound vacated the building in 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s vastly better than the relatively remote outdoor pickup and dropoff area along Spring Garden Street<\/a> in Northern Liberties that bus carriers had been using for the last two and a half years, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would go over to Spring Garden, and it wasn\u2019t as easy as coming back here,\u201d Herald said. \u201cThe travel\u2019s out the way, and you don\u2019t have a dedicated bus station, so you\u2019re kind of standing outside in the elements. It wasn\u2019t really a nice experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

A big collaborative effort<\/p>\n

In addition to putting in new flooring and new seating for 189 people, the PPA fixed the plumbing, cleaned the skylights, put in modern bathrooms with baby changing stations, and installed a private lactation pod for nursing moms.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As part of the roughly $5 million project, the station now has 11 renovated bus bays out back, up from nine before, and they\u2019re fully accessible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Security cameras monitor the building inside and out, and an automated camera system tracks bus movements so carriers can be charged newly established usage fees, which will help pay for the station improvements and operations.<\/p>\n

\"\"Temple University student Chris Herald waited for a bus at Philadelphia\u2019s intercity bus station. May 1, 2026. (Meir Rinde\/Billy Penn)<\/p>\n

As Herald and a few other passengers waited inside the mostly empty station Friday morning, a few PPA bus ambassadors stood at a desk near the station entrance, checking in passengers with tablet devices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On the Filbert Street sidewalk outside, workers on ladders made final adjustments, applying colorful murals to panels that had been attached to the brick wall, and fiddling with netting that keeps pigeons from roosting under the awning over the front steps.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It took \u201ca lot of collaborative effort on behalf of the city and the parking authority\u2026 to really make this come together in a way that was clean, safe and comfortable for the riding public, and with the emphasis on ensuring that we provided excellent customer service,\u201d PPA transportation center manager John McDaniel said.<\/p>\n

Early Friday, shortly after the station opened at midnight, there were some communication \u201cglitches\u201d that led to some passengers missing their buses, but the ambassadors did a \u201cyeoman\u2019s job\u201d getting them rebooked, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s clean, that\u2019s for sure\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the people waiting in the station late Friday morning were not from Philadelphia and were just dimly aware of the long saga of its closure and reopening. But most said they were pleased to be there nonetheless.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve seen that on the news, so that was pretty cool. We\u2019re like, \u2018we\u2019re coming there the first day it opened,\u2019\u201d said Ashlea Milsom, who is from Morton in Delaware County and was traveling with her family to the Poconos.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s really cool and stuff,\u201d said her 8-year-old daughter Leah Asbury, who said she\u2019d never been in a bus station before.<\/p>\n

\"\"William Asbury, Ashlea Milsom, and their daughter Leah, from Morton in Delaware County, waited at Philadelphia\u2019s intercity bus station for their bus to the Poconos. (Meir Rinde\/Billy Penn)<\/p>\n

Traveler Christian Perez said he visits occasionally from upstate New York to see his girlfriend, and actually preferred Spring Garden because it\u2019s a more convenient location for her family to pick him up. He admitted, though, that the renovated terminal \u201cis pretty nice. Not even gonna lie \u2014 it\u2019s clean, that\u2019s for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trevor Ising of West Chester was waiting to start a trip to North Carolina. The Filbert Street station was \u201cpretty calming\u201d compared to other bus terminals he\u2019s been in, he said, and the bathrooms were clean and in good condition.<\/p>\n

Out beyond the station\u2019s rear glass doors, Greyhound driver Wayne Rhodes stood by the door of a bus he was about to drive to Scranton, waiting for his last few passengers to arrive. He said he was glad to be back using a proper bus station, after a couple of years dealing with parked cars and other annoyances on Spring Garden.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAs long as the traffic is good, they don\u2019t let them park all over the place, so we can get the buses in and out, we\u2019ll be fine,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s better for the passengers. At least you got restrooms and things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mixed feelings in Chinatown<\/p>\n

Greyhound ended its more than 30-year tenancy<\/a> in the building in June 2023 as its new parent company moved to abandon stations across the country in the face of competition from carriers who use cheaper curbside pickup.<\/p>\n

The 76ers organization took an option to purchase the property, with plans to demolish it and incorporate the site into its planned Market Street basketball stadium<\/a>. The front of the boarded-up building was quickly covered with graffiti, and the Chinatown community pushed for the property owner to erect fencing to keep out potential squatters.<\/p>\n

\"\"An unhoused person briefly camped at the entrance to Philadelphia\u2019s newly reopened intercity bus station. May 1, 2026. (Meir Rinde\/Billy Penn)<\/p>\n

The Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation and others have criticized the terminal for bringing exhaust and potentially dangerous bus traffic to the neighborhood; the city and PPA have required drivers to use new routes to and from the station to lessen their use of smaller streets.<\/p>\n

Deborah Wei, a long time Chinatown activist and co-founder of Asian Americans United, said she had mixed feelings about the reactivation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As she waited for her banh mi to be prepared at QT, a popular sandwich shop steps away from the station, she said she was happy for the city that the terminal had been reopened \u2014 \u201cthe whole not having a bus station was kind of utterly ridiculous\u201d \u2014 and she liked the renovations.<\/p>\n

\"\"A worker adjusted netting over the entrance to Philadelphia\u2019s intercity bus station. May 1, 2026. (Meir Rinde\/Billy Penn)<\/p>\n

But the building\u2019s abandonment for years, until the 76ers dropped their stadium plan in 2025 and the PPA announced plans to reopen it, continues to anger her.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey intentionally closed it down, unnecessarily, for two and a half years, and in my mind, purposely created blight in the community,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was not maintained. I was constantly having to call the councilman\u2019s office. There was graffiti. There was pigeon poop everywhere. It was a convenient way for billionaire developers to say, \u2018Oh, look, Chinatown\u2019s blighted.\u2019 Well, you blighted it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo put this community through what they put us through for two and a half years, and without a single apology and without any restitution \u2014 it\u2019s bittersweet.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Love Philly? So do we. Let\u2019s be friends.\u00a0Sign up for the Billy Penn newsletter today. As a frequent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182809,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[81539,14501,12063,564,14502,61660,15975,14505,69,34711,71,70,5204,2155,4491],"class_list":["post-182808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-asian-americans-united-aau","tag-bus-station","tag-chinatown","tag-featured","tag-greyhound","tag-intercity-bus-station","tag-market-east","tag-office-of-transportation-and-infrastructure-systems-otis","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-chinatown-development-corporation","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-philadelphia-parking-authority","tag-transportation","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}