The Lead: The $11B Upgrade to the Nyc Commute
Monroe County's average commute clocks in at 38.1 minutes one way, per the latest Census estimate, and East Stroudsburg has repeatedly shown up near the top of national rankings for the longest commutes.. But more than 20,000 residents commute even farther into New York, New Jersey, and the Lehigh Valley for work. And a lot of that traffic funnels into one of the saddest places on the planet: New York City’s Port Authority.
For Monroe County residents commuting into the City without a car, Martz Trailways is effectively the only game in town, running daily service from Mount Pocono and the Stroudsburg/East Stroudsburg area straight into the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 625 Eighth Avenue.
That terminal has a reputation, and boy is it earned. Honestly, I tried to find a humorous comparison, but I usually use the Port Authority as the relevant analogy when discussing dumps. Opened in 1950, it is the world’s busiest bus terminal, according to the Port Authority, serving approximately 205,000 passengers on an average weekday in 2025. It has spent decades collecting complaints: leaking pipes, overflowing bathrooms, chronic delays, and — as one wheelchair-using rider recounted in a recent review — genuinely rough treatment of passengers with disabilities. Homeless people are a conspicuous presence, particularly on very hot and very cold days. The Port Authority's own word for the building is “functionally obsolete.” I walked through it yesterday and it is hard to imagine a sadder place.
Martz feeds into the terminal's South Wing, the original 1950s structure, sharing the lower level with several other bus lines. The “newer” North Wing (itself now over 45 years old) mostly handles New Jersey Transit's commuter buses.
Over the next decade (or so they say), the existing dump will be replaced by a brand-new facility. When it's finished, the new terminal won't resemble the dim, cramped building Monroe County commuters know today. The design, from architecture firm Foster + Partners, centers on a soaring multi-story glass atrium fronting West 41st Street, topped with a central skylight to flood the space with natural light — a deliberate contrast to the current terminal's low ceilings and fluorescent gloom that only a vampire would love. The finished building will spread the cramped bus operations across multiple levels with more than 150 gates, all tied more directly into the subway system below. A separate seven-floor storage and staging facility to the west will eventually hold up to 350 buses off city streets. The facility has net-zero goals and is being designed to accommodate an all-electric bus fleet, with technology intended to smooth the chaos of buses jockeying for gates.
This supposed metamorphosis is set to proceed in two phases:
Phase 1: External Infrastructure (now through roughly 2030). New Lincoln Tunnel ramps, a bus storage and staging facility, and the Dyer Avenue deck-overs will be constructed. The structures will be built over below-grade sections of Dyer Avenue and the Lincoln Tunnel Expressway. As of late April, crews began placing the first of 139 steel girders for those decks, a real construction milestone after years of planning. The decks will serve as temporary bus staging before becoming 3.5 acres of public green space.
Phase 2: Terminal Demolition and Rebuild (roughly 2030–2035). The existing terminal comes down and its replacement goes up on the same site.
When finished, the new terminal will be able to handle 1,000 buses an hour, up from about 600 today, and to meet projected bus demand through 2040–2050. The usual caveat when it comes to construction deadlines; this timeline has already moved once — earlier versions had construction starting in 2025 and finishing by 2032 — so treat any completion date as the agency's current best guess.
The Port Authority has not announced any Martz-specific gate changes tied to the current phase — the work underway now is primarily adjacent to the terminal, rather than inside it. But this building has a track record: NJ Transit's advisory archive shows the Port Authority has repeatedly issued temporary gate reassignment notices for South Wing carriers during past construction, as recently as this January. History suggests Monroe County commuters should expect some version of that shuffle again, especially once Phase 2 demolition begins. We'll be watching.
