Greyhound’s lease on its Harrison Street terminal is set to end in October, and operators will likely have to vacate the site by Sept. 20. The city has yet to nail down a plan for where riders and buses will go when that happens. Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago
by Quinn Myers August 28, 2024 BLOCK CLUB
WEST LOOP — Chicago will become the largest city in the northern hemisphere — and one of only three of the 130 most-populous cities in the world — to not have an intercity bus terminal if its Greyhound station closes next month as planned.
That’s the finding of a policy brief released Tuesday by DePaul University’s Chaddick Institute, which studies transportation and urban planning issues in Chicago and elsewhere.
The fate of Chicago’s Greyhound terminal at 630 W. Harrison St. has been uncertain since FlixBus bought the company in 2021. That deal did not include the station and numerous other properties.
The following year, 33 Greyhound terminals were bought by a subsidiary of the Alden Global Capital investment firm, which has floated plans to redevelop the Chicago site.
Flix North America’s lease on the Harrison Street property ends in October, and operators will have to vacate the facility by Sept. 20, company vice president Gilda Brewton said Tuesday during a webinar hosted the High Speed Rail Alliance.
The impending closure has led transit experts and advocates to urge the city to come up with a suitable plan to offer indoor waiting space for intercity bus riders and an efficient pick-up and drop-off operation — but no proposal has been nailed down.
DePaul professor Joe Schwieterman, who authored the policy brief released Tuesday, said Chicago’s intercity bus “crisis” could disproportionately impact a system often used by older people, low-income riders, those with disabilities and people who can’t or don’t drive.
“We want to make sure everyone knows how unprecedented this is, being a major global city without a bus terminal,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “In Chicago, the loss of the station is not getting the attention it deserves among both the city and agencies devoted to transportation.”
A spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Transportation did not return a request for comment Tuesday.
The DePaul report used several factors to determine what qualifies as an intercity bus terminal in major cities. Those include having a physical structure to act as a shelter for riders, being located within 10 kilometers of a city center, and having boarding take place “away from city streets.”
If the Chicago Greyhound terminal does close, Chicago will become the only city among the 15 most populous cities in the Global North without a facility that meets those criteria. Worldwide, it will join only Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Nairobi, Kenya, as the only cities among the world’s 130 largest that do not have an intercity bus station, according to the brief.
LINK to the rest of the story: https://blockclubchicago.org/2024/08/28/chicago-could-be-one-of-few-big-cities-globally-without-an-intercity-bus-station-if-greyhound-closes/