The 10-year project to rebuild New York City’s main bus terminal is bogging down rush-hour travel from New Jersey, leaving commuters fuming aboard idling buses and late for work.
The terminal’s operator, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, has embarked on an $11 billion plan to replace the 76-year-old hub and the ramps that connect it to the Lincoln Tunnel.
It’s one of two major transit construction projects coinciding to complicate the daily trip to the city for more than 250,000 commuters from New Jersey.
The demolition of those ramps has led to lane closures and detours that have added as much as an hour to a bus ride into the city that usually takes less than 45 minutes, commuters have said. Others said they were working from home more often because of the persistent delays, but that is not an option for some commuters, like Fatima Figarola.
Ms. Figarola said she had been commuting from her home in Caldwell, N.J., to her theater-industry job in Midtown for nearly 15 years, usually arriving well before the 9:30 a.m. start of her shift. But after about a month of delayed arrivals, she pushed her schedule back 30 minutes, she said.
On Wednesday, a 19-mile bus ride on NJ Transit, the statewide transit agency, lasted nearly two hours and made her late for that delayed start, she said.
“It’s frustrating,” Ms. Figarola said. “The biggest issue for me is the fact that we sit in the bus lane for 20 to 40 minutes and don’t move.”
The bus lane she referred to is known as the Exclusive Bus Lane or XBL, which the Port Authority sets up weekday mornings on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel for buses to travel against the flow of outbound traffic. Its purpose is to speed the last leg of their trips to the terminal.
Buses are the most popular mode of transit for New Jersey commuters; about 200,000 people arrive at the bus terminal on a typical weekday, and almost twice as many ride NJ Transit’s trains into the nearby Pennsylvania Station. Many take buses operated by private companies.
Some commuters switched from the rails to the roads recently because NJ Transit has sharply reduced and revised its train schedule for five weeks while it finishes rerouting service onto a new bridge in North Jersey. That disruption coincided with the Port Authority’s construction around the bus terminal.
“Between the two, it’s been horrible,” said Ms. Figarola, 50.
Kris Kolluri, the chief executive of NJ Transit, said at an agency board meeting last week that the work on the bus terminal “has led to half-hour delays, particularly during rush hour.” The transit agency has also warned its customers that the construction will affect bus service “in and out of the existing terminal.”
Data collected from NJ Transit’s buses by HelixAlert.com, which assesses bus traffic approaching the Lincoln Tunnel, confirmed that buses had been taking considerably longer to get into the city during morning rush hours.
The typical bus trip along that segment exceeded 20 minutes only once in the first three weeks of September, compared with 12 times in the past month, the HelixAlert data shows, according to its creator, Vlad Lyandres, a regular bus commuter from New Jersey.
The worse news for the bus riders is that the Port Authority this week started detouring inbound buses around a block of Midtown while it demolishes and rebuilds ramps to the terminal. On each of the first three days that detour was in effect, the longest trips recorded by HelixAlert exceeded 40 minutes, longer than on all but three days in the previous six weeks.
Port Authority officials warned commuters that their trips to work “may be impacted by delays and increased travel times,” but did not quantify that impact.
A Port Authority spokesman, Tom Topousis, said the agency was monitoring traffic conditions and “deploying personnel on the ground to minimize delays.” He said the agency was prioritizing NJ Transit buses to ensure that they can maintain their routes through the XBL into the terminal.
The bus terminal project is divided into two phases. The first involves the construction of a deck over a road that leads to the Lincoln Tunnel to create space for the staging of the complete overhaul of the bus terminal, which occupies two blocks along Eighth Avenue. That phase is expected to last until 2030. The entire project is scheduled to be completed in 2035.
Some commuters have already lost patience. On Reddit, one bus rider sought support for his appeal to Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey for relief, saying that “traffic into the Port Authority bus terminal has increased my commute time by about an hour a day.” Several other Reddit users weighed in with similar complaints.
Ms. Figarola said she would consider switching to a train, even though there is no station close to her home. But she would have to wait a few more weeks until her local train service is no longer being diverted from Penn Station because of the rail-bridge replacement.
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