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’s main intercity bus station on Friday.
“It looks really nice, smells new, and, you know, the staff are helpful,” he said, as he sat in one of the new chairs recently installed in the terminal’s light-filled waiting area. “So it’s a very good situation for the city.”
Thanks to extensive renovations by the Philadelphia Parking Authority, which now operates the station, he said the facility on Filbert Street near Chinatown no longer feels “torn down,” as it did before Greyhound vacated the building in 2023.
And it’s vastly better than the relatively remote outdoor pickup and dropoff area along Spring Garden Street in Northern Liberties that bus carriers had been using for the last two and a half years, he said.
“I would go over to Spring Garden, and it wasn’t as easy as coming back here,” Herald said. “The travel’s out the way, and you don’t have a dedicated bus station, so you’re kind of standing outside in the elements. It wasn’t really a nice experience.”
A big collaborative effort
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.
As part of the roughly $5 million project, the station now has 11 renovated bus bays out back, up from nine before, and they’re fully accessible.
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.
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.
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.
It took “a lot of collaborative effort on behalf of the city and the parking authority… 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,” PPA transportation center manager John McDaniel said.
Early Friday, shortly after the station opened at midnight, there were some communication “glitches” that led to some passengers missing their buses, but the ambassadors did a “yeoman’s job” getting them rebooked, he said.
“It’s clean, that’s for sure”
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.
“We’ve seen that on the news, so that was pretty cool. We’re like, ‘we’re coming there the first day it opened,’” said Ashlea Milsom, who is from Morton in Delaware County and was traveling with her family to the Poconos.
“I think it’s really cool and stuff,” said her 8-year-old daughter Leah Asbury, who said she’d never been in a bus station before.
Traveler Christian Perez said he visits occasionally from upstate New York to see his girlfriend, and actually preferred Spring Garden because it’s a more convenient location for her family to pick him up. He admitted, though, that the renovated terminal “is pretty nice. Not even gonna lie — it’s clean, that’s for sure.”
Trevor Ising of West Chester was waiting to start a trip to North Carolina. The Filbert Street station was “pretty calming” compared to other bus terminals he’s been in, he said, and the bathrooms were clean and in good condition.
Out beyond the station’s 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.
“As long as the traffic is good, they don’t let them park all over the place, so we can get the buses in and out, we’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s better for the passengers. At least you got restrooms and things.”
Mixed feelings in Chinatown
Greyhound ended its more than 30-year tenancy 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.
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. 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.
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.
Deborah Wei, a long time Chinatown activist and co-founder of Asians Americans United, said she had mixing feelings about the reactivation.
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 — “the whole not having a bus station was kind of utterly ridiculous” — and she liked the renovations.
But the building’s abandonment for years, until the 76ers dropped their stadium plan in 2025 and the PPA announced plans to reopen it, continues to anger her.
“They intentionally closed it down, unnecessarily, for two and a half years, and in my mind, purposely created blight in the community,” she said. “It was not maintained. I was constantly having to call the councilman’s office. There was graffiti. There was pigeon poop everywhere. It was a convenient way for billionaire developers to say, ‘Oh, look, Chinatown’s blighted.’ Well, you blighted it.”
“To put this community through what they put us through for two and a half years, and without a single apology and without any restitution — it’s bittersweet.”