That’s what its Wikipedia article says: 1850 buses, 70000 passengers between 6 and 10 AM, which is a bus every eight seconds. Can that be right?
I don’t live there, so I can’t say for sure, but it doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. Lots of commuter buses come into New York City during the work week and I’m sure many, if not most, go through the Lincoln Tunnel to get there. Someone prove it wrong.
How many lanes is the tunnel? And how much non-bus traffic is going through?
Seeing as the tunnel has a dedicated bus lane and multiple bus-only ramps leading directly into the Port Authority Bus Terminal on the New York side, those numbers sound entirely plausible.
A link to the Wikipedia article, and the quote, which the OP should have included:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Tunnel#Exclusive_bus_lane
The line about the 1,850 buses has a citation footnote, going to a page on the Port Authority’s website about the tunnel, which has the same numbers.
And from the picture, the exclusive bus lane is separated with barriers from the car lanes, so no matter how much car traffic backs up & slows down, the buses can continue to move at their full speed.
A standard bus is 40 ft along. If they space the buses 6 bus lengths apart, that’s 280 ft total between the front of each bus. If one bus passes every 8 seconds, that’s a speed of 280 ft/8 sec = 35 ft/sec = 25 mph, so one every 8 seconds in a dedicated lane is very feasible.
Three tubes, two lanes each, but as stated above, one is a dedicated bus lane; that dedicated lane begins at the exit from the NJ turnpike, which is about three+ miles from the entrance to the tunnel, & within a block of coming out is the ramp to the Port Authority bus terminal garage.
One highway lane can handle roughly 2,000 vehicles per hour. Speed actually doesn’t matter much, because higher speeds require longer gaps between vehicles. Busy surface streets can drop below 1,000. Since buses are about twice as long as cars assume you can only fit half as many. The tunnel is still only at half capacity with 462.5 buses per hour.
Also, 70,000 people in four hours is 17,500 per hour. That would require four or five car lanes, and that assumes a very generous two people per car.
Also, from what I understand, parking is very hard to come by in Manhattan, so there’s a strong incentive for folks to use public transportation rather than their own vehicles.
Another incentive is the recently introduced congestion charge for driving below 60th Street.
I don’t think the Lincoln Tunnel was around for the 1850 buses.
The most important issue seems to be the eXclusive Bus Lane, with mechanical separation & their own entrances & exits, means the bus traffic is completely independent of the car traffic. So no matter how bad the car traffic gets, the buses keep moving.
Sure, it’s easy to send 1850 buses thru in four hours, long as you have a reservoir at the entrance to meter them in from. But 99%? 100%? of them go to the Port Auth Terminal? How many can unload at one time? Where do they go after – back west? Plenty of room in the westbound tunnel in the morning?
Seems like backups would often happen, one place or another.
Port Authority has 223 departure gates.
I don’t know New York, but in Cleveland, there’s a “transit center” on the edge of downtown where a whole bunch of buses park during the day, waiting to take passengers back out to to residential areas in the evening rush hour. There’s also some trackage downtown and on the bridge where trains park during the day, for the same reason.
Again I don’t know if New York does this, but some routes in some cities change the direction of lanes with time of day, so for instance, in the morning there might be five lanes into downtown and two out, but two in and five out in the evening. Cleveland used to do this, but stopped because there were too many accidents, but it’s probably more reliable with professional drivers.
Doesn’t this also mean that a single bus breaking down would block this entire lane & all this traffic? If this bus lane is physically separated, other busses couldn’t go around a broken-down bus.
This is what the XBL is - a temporary conversion of a westbound lane into an eastbound lane. The only difference from most cities is that the temporary counterflow lane is exclusively for buses.
Pretty much. No place in Manhattan for them to hang out (there was a bus parking lot proposed a while back, but dedicating some of the most expensive real estate in the world to a gigantic parking lot that would only be used a few hours a day didn’t fly.
Googling, here is an article from the New York Post about the mess caused in September 2024 by a broken-down bus in the Lincoln Tunnel during commute hours. “A disabled bus stalled out in the south tube of the tunnel before 7 a.m., helping to create the hours-long delays that ensnared many commuters trying to just make it to their desks.” The article includes photos showing long lines of buses along the route.
I used to live in Hoboken and buses were frequent. The 126 line was the one that I would use, and the schedule shows 23 outbound and 124 inbound buses between 6 and 10 am. Looking at the NJ Transit bus schedules, and pretty much every line between 100 and 199 ends up at NY Penn Station. The Hoboken line is probably one of the busiest, but I can believe that 1850 buses go through the tunnel.
Yes, one thing to bear in mind in this discussion is that the Port Authority bus terminal is gigantic, and extremely busy.