Greyhound’s NoMa terminal

DDOT is planning to force all intercity buses that currently load on city streets, including the Chinatown buses and BoltBus, to abandon their current stops and instead use a single “bus zone” in Southwest, near L’Enfant Metro.

We’ll add our voice to the chorus emerging online decrying this as a truly awful idea.

The idea of a single terminal for intercity buses isn’t so bad, it’s the specific location of this proposal that’s the problem. Intercity transportation terminals belong in the most central and active part of the city because such terminals both feed off of and add to the vitality of that part of the city. Banishing them to forever empty L’Enfant Plaza hurts everyone. If there were a plan to use buses to generate vitality in L’Enfant we might get behind that, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.

The worst part about this proposal is that we should know better. The city can’t wait to get Greyhound out of its terminal in NoMa and into Union Station because everybody knows the back side of NoMa isn’t a central or lively enough place for a major intercity transportation depot. Why duplicate a situation we already know is undesirable?