The Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown is widely regarded as the worst transit hub in New York. Proposals are moving forward today to upgrade and rebuild the Bus Terminal while neglecting the infrastructural issues that makes commuting from New Jersey extremely difficult.
Today, commuting from new jersey to new york is unpredictable, uncomfortable, and requires multiple transfers.
Over 200K passengers choose bus service on a daily basis over rail to reach manhattan.
Traffic jams, deadly accidents, and backups will effect hundreds-of-thousands of new jersey commuters on a daily basis.
The state has proposed replacing the port authority bus terminal. the current proposal however does not add capacity at the lincoln tunnel. . .
Building a new bus terminal yields meager capacity growth and no scalability, as long as the lincoln tunnel remains a bottleneck.
RUN42 takes a new approach: Our plan adds new rail capacity into the core to remove the Lincoln Tunnel bottleneck and unlock development.
In order to accommodate an increase in ridership, new core capacity is needed; not a bigger bus terminal. . .
A much better approach to investing billions in infrastructure spending than rebuilding the Port Authority Bus Terminal is to invest in a new rail tunnel into the core. With this approach, New Jersey can easily accomodate additional ridership without further congesting its transit networks. New rail capacity also unlocks potential for branch line re-activations for passenger service, creating even more capacity for new housing. RUN42 takes this approach.
RUN42 is designed to connect the region’s trains and buses into the new cores.
This will create a high-bandwith spine that connects the entire region’s labor markets to new cores.
RUN42 is at once a rail-based alternative to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a development proposal for West Midtown, a strategy for bringing high-speed rail to isolated neighborhoods in New Jersey, South Brooklyn and Queens, a connective throughway to the city’s cores, and a step towards establishing a regional rail network that is both fast and convenient. That is to say, it replaces existing proposals, but it also much more.
RUN42 solves two geographically disparate issues of weak connectivity by giving more people direct high-speed access to the cores of Newark, Midtown, and Sunnyside. It allows for additional future capacity by reactivating abandoned rail lines in New Jersey. And finally, it establishes a symmetrical system that can grow as the city continues to grow in the future.
The current plan is to build on top of the new Bus Station.
The RUN42 plan’s upgraded rail service will make the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown no longer necessary. RUN42 will remove the Bus Terminal, unlocking 6.5 blocks for new development. The estimated value of this opportunity is $25 Billion.
Today, the PABT and its on/off ramps occupy 6.5 blocks of valuable Midtown real estate. A new trunkline into Manhattan would remove the need for the Bus Terminal in Midtown, unlocking a $25 billion real estate opportunity in its place. This will open up all 6.5 blocks to development.
This reduces demolition of the neighborhoods existing buildings and character. Buildings in yellow are located on land currently owned by Port Authority that can be developed. Buildings in blue are on land not owned by Port Authority but can be purchased and modified with new air rights.
Replacing the Port Authority Bus Terminal with rail service into three new stations on 42nd street terminating service at Grand Central. Paid for by reinvesting budgets set aside for expanding the Bus Terminal and leveraging the $20 Billion land use opportunity that’s unlocked by the Terminal’s demolition
