Over a decade ago, local officials envisioned a “multimodal” transit hub in Raleigh—a downtown focal point where Amtrak, commuter rail, and local and regional bus routes would all converge. It would make Raleigh’s public transit systems easier and more convenient to use, and would catalyze economic development in the surrounding Warehouse District.
In the words of former mayor Nancy McFarlane, it would be “a front door to the city.”
That vision was partially realized in 2018 with the completion of Raleigh Union Station, the new and expanded train station. And in August 2025, the Raleigh Union Station bus facility, or RUS Bus, is slated to open next door. But while RUS Bus will serve a multitude of GoTriangle and GoRaleigh bus routes—ten in total, according to a GroTriangle spokesman—one key piece of the original plan will be absent: regional Greyhound buses.
Eric Curry, the GoTriangle spokesman, confirmed to INDY that Greyhound will not be part of the transportation mix at RUS bus—at least not anytime soon.
“That may be something that GoTriangle and transit partners will consider once the facility opens,” Curry wrote in an email.
Greyhound did not respond to multiple requests for comment, except to say that “We have no updates to share regarding our operations at the Capital Blvd. location.”
Raleigh’s Greyhound terminal is currently located at 2210 Capital Boulevard, more than three miles outside the city center. If Union Station is the front door to the city, this is the back door, where people who can’t afford to fly, train, or drive into Raleigh arrive by bus and are greeted by an inhospitable landscape of strip malls, concrete, and highway.
It wasn’t always this way: Greyhound occupied a prime spot in downtown Raleigh from 1969 until 2014, when it sold its property at 314 W. Jones Street for $4.75 million to developer Ted Reynolds, who demolished it and built upscale apartments.
At the time, local outlets reported that the move to Capital Boulevard was “likely to be temporary.” The idea was that Greyhound would relocate to the RUS Bus facility once it was built.
In the meantime, some city officials tried to argue the far-flung Capital Boulevard location was “more convenient” for Greyhound riders.
“Their facility was rundown,” then-city councilor Mary-Ann Baldwin told INDY in 2014. “It didn’t connect with anything either.”
Critics of the move viewed it more cynically.
“A nexus of poor people, taxi drivers and bus travelers … doesn’t quite fit into Raleigh’s new creative class vision for itself,” INDY wrote at the time.
Compared to many of its peer cities—as identified by the Chicago Fed and the NC Justice Center—Raleigh’s Greyhound station is uniquely distant from its downtown core and other transit options. In Boston, Atlanta, Austin, and Washington, D.C., the Greyhound terminal is part of a major multimodal transit hub, making connections easy. In Nashville and Charlotte, Greyhound is a short walk from downtown.
Sometime between 2014 and 2024, Greyhound’s plans to relocate from Capital Boulevard to RUS Bus went from “likely” to distant and uncertain. INDY requested public records from the City of Raleigh related to Greyhound and RUS Bus on November 12 and has not yet received a response. Curry of GoTriangle told INDY it’s “too early for formal conversations” with Greyhound about moving to the RUS bus facility and there is “no timetable set to begin those talks.”
Mitchell Silver was Raleigh’s planning director in the early 2010s and oversaw some of the early planning of Union Station.
“When it was planned, we wanted it to be a regional hub,” Silver says. “We were in conversation with Greyhound, there were discussions about them relocating. At that time, it was conceived as the primary transit hub for the city with as many modes as possible.”
Silver left Raleigh in 2014 to become New York City’s parks commissioner, so he wasn’t involved in the bus facility’s design or construction phases. (He’s since returned to Raleigh and was recently elected to the city council.) But during the idea stage, he was inspired by New York City’s transit hub in Midtown Manhattan.
“This is very similar to the Port Authority concept in New York, where you had both local and also regional buses,” Silver says. “That was where the concept came from. It just made perfect sense.”
Chloe Courtney Bohl is a corps member for Report for America. Reach her at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
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