A proposal for reforming Philadelphia’s Intercity Transit
I live in New York City and have largely enjoyed my time there. But I did not grow up there. Rather, I grew up in South Jersey, not too far from Philadelphia. So when I travel home I will usually take some sort of transit from New York to Philadelphia and go home from there.
For years I was taking charter busses, cheap services that would go between New York and Philadelphia at cheap prices. There were a lot of them: Peter Pan, Flix, Greyhound, and MegaBus.
Yet we now stand at a precipice and it’s an important moment for state DoT officials to get involved. The era of abundant, cheap intercity busses is coming to an end.
Bankrupcies
MegaBus was a cheap service, but not a good one. Taking it frequently over many years, I found myself collecting a number of bad stories. Delays were common. Traffic sucked sometimes. It was once delayed for several hours while I stood in the freezing cold. One time it crossed into Philly and immediately broke down.
But it did get me from home to home. Departing from Hudson Yards was fairly accessible for me, taking about 20 minutes to take the subway from my apartment.
This went away in the last few months. MegaBus went bankrupt. Perhaps it was cheap, but didn’t meet customer demand. It has been acquired by Peter Pan and the MegaBus mascot has been retired.
Whenever I’m on a MegaBus it’s usually packed, so if they can’t make a profit from that then they were doing business wrong. But it’s more likely that my tickets were subsidizing unprofitable routes like New York to San Antonio. Like Amtrak, I assume the Northeast Corridor is successful and then other routes operate at a loss.
Once I took a MegaBus from New York to Boston, which was a bad idea. We left on a Friday around 2pm. About three hours were spent in city traffic before we got onto the highway. A six-hour ride turned into nine hours. I certainly wouldn’t do that again. I’m not surprised long routes have few customers. But shorter routes, a two-hour ride between Philly and New York, works very well for the price point.
We’re not just losing MegaBus. Greyhound also appears to be on the verge of collapse. That would degrade lots of intercity services across the country and would make things worse for its many riders.
Looking at the NY<->PHI market since the loss of MegaBus, bus ticket prices have gone up. This is an expected result from less competition. It stings, especially for those who chose these services for their low prices.
Beyond bus services failing, cities are failing to adequately serve bus customers. At one point Philly had a Greyhound station on 10th Street. Greyhound sold off that lot as part of its slow demise. That would’ve been a neat place for busses to pick up and drop off students.
However the city has failed to execute on a plan. Now, these intercity busses operate in a post-industrial neighborhood on Spring Garden Street, just a wide road and nothing else. There’s no shelter. There are no bathrooms. There’s no vending machines. You’re just thrown off onto the sidewalk and left on your own.
Transit Reforms
Amtrak already operates service between New York and Philly. Both Penn Station and 30th Street Station are good destinations with easy access to intra-city transit. Could it step in to offer low-cost rides between these stations?
Right now it’s a great choice for several reasons. A dedicated right-of-way means the trip is half an hour shorter by default and without ever getting traffic. It’s certainly more comfortable than the bus seats and the onboard Wi-Fi works twice as often.
But it’s just so expensive. For most people their Night Owl service, which provides a large discount for trains along the NEC, doesn’t fit their schedules. It’s still hard for me to justify paying that much for a slightly better ride, and I can’t imagine less wealthy people paying that more easily.
I understand that the Boston<->DC line is long and that the Acela is a premium ride. But what about people who don’t need either of those things? I just want to go between New York and Philadelphia, a fraction of the route and in the regular speed Amtrak cars. I think there’s a real opportunity to serve this market with low-cost intercity rail.
Beyond Amtrak, I think that NJ Transit can also serve a key role in a single-ride from New York all the way to Philadelphia. After all, NJ Tranist and Amtrak run on the same right-of-way. It should be possible for NJ Transit to switch to the Amtrak rail after Trenton and ride a few minutes longer to 30th Street Station.
Right now there’s a way to travel between Trenton and Philly through the SEPTA line. I’ve never tried that method. But it is definitely less convenient. Traveling between homes, carrying suitcases and things, having a single seat ride to the end would make my life any many others easier.
It just makes sense from a transit perspective. NJ Transit already starts in New York, so some deal has been arranged to enable interstate transit. There are a lot of NJ<->NY commuters. I would imagine there are many people who commute between NJ and Philly each day, but often are required to drive. There are six thousand daily riders from Trenton to Philly and nearly 19,000 daily riders on the PATCO.
Extending the Trenton line by an additional stop would add an extra half hour. I don’t know why they don’t do this already, but my assumption is some sort of political disagreement between Pennsylvania and New Jersey state governments.
Governor Murphy of NJ and the state legislature has recently passed a corporate tax raise in order to solidify sustainable funding for NJ Transit. This is a great move and will help improve service long-term. In addition to improving service, they should consider more ways that their transit system can better serve the public by extending service.
In lieu of that, perhaps New Jersey should consider new bus routes. New Jersey’s bus transit already operates intercity routes, taking NJ residents to Philadelphia. They also operate intercity routes out of New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal to places like Hoboken.
If this NY<->PA routes is valuable enough to riders, it should be replicated by public transit. I don’t know what kind of infrastructure changes would be necessary for NJ Transit to run to Philadelphia, but running busses requires no changes. They could take riders from PABT to a small but functional shelter in downtown Philadelphia. It could prove the need for later infrastructure changes. It wouldn’t have to operate at a loss, but it also could provide greater competition and help keep other bus lines honest.
Conclusion
The era of abundant, cheap intercity busses is coming to an end but the need is not. People need to travel between cities for all kinds of reasons. The goal of transit is to reach the destination reliably and safely.
While MegaBus once did this through a private market, it cannot any longer. This hole in the market is leading to worse service and higher prices. In other words, it’s leading to a market failure. It is during these failures that it makes sense for government to fill the hole.
The good news is that we have everything we need. We have existing rail right-of-ways. We have the train cars. We have a fleet of busses. What the public needs from the government is the ability for states to work together to create something that works to serve the public.
I understand this can be difficult. Interstate projects have hard buy-in from individual states. But I challenge each state DoT to dream bigger, beyond the confines of state borders. After all, the Northeast is made up of lots of small states that we freely travel between. We share many things like highways and tunnels, even people. If these transit reforms occur, we’ll all benefit.