How to decrease bus traffic at the GWB bus terminal

I often take the Express Service "jitney" from the George Washington Bridge Bus Station to get home from work. These small buses arrive and leave the bus terminal at fairly short intervals; I haven't timed it, but I'd estimate on the order of 5 minutes between each bus. This means there tends to be a lot of buses arriving and leaving on a regular basis. This is a good thing, since it usually takes only seven minutes from the time you leave the subway till you're on the bridge (more on that another time). The problem, though, is the route the buses take. Let me walk you through it in the map below:

View Broken Bus Route in a larger map

• The blue line shows the path a bus takes leaving the GWB to discharge passengers on the upper deck of the bus terminal.
• After dropping off the passengers, it takes the green path, down a ramp from the upper deck, onto an off-ramp from the bridge. It then needs to make a left-hand turn on to Broadway, shown in yellow, sitting at one traffic light (red triangle) before making another left turn on to W179th St after sitting at another traffic light. Then, it finally makes a left into the lower level of the bus terminal.
• After picking up riders, the bus exits the station on the red path, making a left onto W178th St, and repeats the loop via Broadway, re-encountering the two traffic lights, before picking up an on-ramp to the bridge.

tl;dr: Each bus does a double loop around the block hitting two traffic lights twice.

This is highly inefficient. These two loops around the block, sitting at two traffic lights, wastes a huge amount of time and money, and adds a lot to traffic. Let's say two buses (there are jitney two lines that do this) arrive and leave every five minutes, i.e. four buses going through this loop every five minutes clogging the roads, for a total of 4 x 288 = 1152 bus trips around this loop daily.

Google Maps says this extra portion of the loop takes about 3 minutes, so it's an extra 6 minutes per bus per trip across the bridge, for 3,456 wasted bus driver hours per day. If each bus holds around 20 people, that's 34,560 passenger hours wasted each day. (I know some buses aren't totally full, but some are overfull and/or seat more people.) If everyone on the bus is earning NY's minimum wage ($7.25/hr) that amounts to over $250k in wasted money every day. Keep in mind, the total time from subway to bridge is usually 7 minutes (I've timed it as low as 4.75 minutes), so nearly half of the time is taken sitting in local street traffic; if local traffic is bad, this can actually nearly double the time (the most I've timed is over 14.5 minutes). In fact, many people pick up the bus from the side on W179th St (this is illegal) to avoid this waste of time. And, this is before estimating the cost in wasted fuel, wear and tear on the roads, added pollution, etc...

Fortunately, there is a really simple solution: Change the direction that the buses go through the lower level of the terminal. Instead of the buses going south, from W179th to W178th, they should go north from W178th to W179th:

View Fixed bus route in a larger map

• Here, again, the blue line shows the path a bus takes leaving the GWB to discharge passengers on the upper deck of the bus terminal.
• After dropping off the passengers, it takes the green path, down a ramp from the upper deck, onto an off-ramp from the bridge. Under this scheme, though, it simply needs to turn directly into the lower level of the bus terminal, completely bypassing Broadway and the two traffic lights.
• After picking up riders, the bus exits the station on the red path, making a left onto W179th St, and immediately picking up the on-ramp to the bridge, skipping the repeated loop via Broadway and the two traffic lights.

tl;dr: Each bus goes directly into station, and from station to bridge without looping around the block

That's it -- it's as simple as changing the direction of the one-way signs and moving the "Do Not Enter" signs to the other side of the building:

View Larger Map

This will reduce congestion, pollution and commute time with essentially no cost. I will be forwarding a link to this post to the Port Authority, so we'll see if something happens.