Bus stations
The Port Authority Bus Terminal moves about 205,000 people every weekday — more than most airports — and is finally being rebuilt in place into the new Midtown Bus Terminal.
At 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, the PABT is the nation’s largest and the world’s busiest bus terminal: 1.9 million square feet across four floors, with NJ Transit as the anchor tenant carrying commuters from New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and the lower Hudson Valley, plus intercity carriers to upstate, New England and Canada. Greyhound left for its own Midtown digs in recent years; the intercity crowd now shares curbs at several nearby stops.
The replacement is fully approved and financed: built in place without closing the old one, the new Midtown Bus Terminal adds a bus storage and staging building between 9th and 10th Avenues to take coaches off the streets. Construction of the Dyer Avenue deck-overs is underway; the full rebuild runs into the 2030s.
The terminal is three buildings’ worth of ramps: find your gate on the app before you enter, and learn the logic — lower-numbered gates serve local NJ routes, the 300-series the suburbs. The A/C/E trains stop directly underneath at 42nd Street. For cheap intercity hops, the curbside competitors on 31st–33rd Streets (Megabus, FlixBus, OurBus) often beat the big terminal on price and punctuality alike.
THE TIO READ
Give yourself 20 minutes the first time: the PABT eats tourists between its ramps and its gate logic. Our habit — arrive by the A/C/E, screenshot the gate number, and skip the food court entirely (the whole of Hell’s Kitchen is two blocks west). And if the price gap is small, the train from Moynihan Hall beats any bus out of this city.
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