Greyhound bus passengers have bathrooms, finally, at Spring Garden Street stop

For weary bus travelers leaving Philadelphia or arriving, relief is at hand.

Ticketed passengers now can access restrooms at the outdoor intercity bus terminal along Spring Garden Avenue, where people line up at the curb to catch their rides to New York, Washington, Boston and hundreds of other points.

A lack of lavatories was a top complaint when the base of operations for Greyhound, Peter Pan, FlixBus and Megabus was moved in mid-November from the 600 block of Market Street to the new location at the border of Northern Liberties.

On Dec. 22 the city opened an elevated trailer with restrooms designated for men and women and a third wheelchair-accessible bathroom with a ramp. The structure looks like those placed in beer gardens or at big outdoor public events.

Greyhound abruptly closed its shared Filbert Street station in late June, a cost-cutting move that has become common in the industry — and one that forced the city to find accommodations for long-haul buses and thousands of passengers on short notice.

The new loo is located in a former industrial area at the corner of Front and Noble Streets, which are mostly paved in cobblestones that can be difficult to traverse for people in wheelchairs, according to advocates.

That was one of an “astonishing” number of barriers for people with disabilities found at the temporary boarding areas on the easternmost blocks of Spring Garden Street and Delaware Avenue, according to a December review by a disability-rights organization and public-transportation watchdogs.

“The setup is OK … but there are some major issues still,” said co-author Micah Fiedler of the urbanist group 5th Square, assessing the added bathrooms.

An attendant in an enclosed booth checks people’s tickets and monitors the use of the toilet facility, open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., according to Matt Cassidy, spokesperson for the city Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability (OTIS).

“Everything we’ve heard from our team on the ground has been positive. It seems the recently installed bathrooms are working well,” Cassidy said, though he added that some people have reported they are hard to find.

He said the location of the restrooms has been added to the large site map inside a 16-seat waiting room on Delaware Avenue with ticket windows (but no public facilities), shared by Greyhound, Flixbus and Peter Pan. The city is working on clearer outdoor directional signs made of sturdier material than the current laminated paper maps tacked to utility poles, Cassidy said.

The city repaved a part of Noble Street with asphalt to cover old railroad tracks to create a smoother path to the toilets from the Delaware Avenue side, he said. But OTIS acknowledges cobblestones remain exposed and there are no sidewalks leading there from Spring Garden Street.

Lack of better paving on the road to the bathrooms impedes people with mobility issues and the wheelchair ramp is “a difficult access point,” Fiedler, of 5th Square, said. He also pointed to “lackluster” signage.

Bus operations were moved from Market Street because that station snarled traffic, interfered with SEPTA bus service and angered nearby businesses. The Spring Garden site has a permit through March 31; officials are looking for a permanent location.