If you haven’t already, go and check out Parts 1 (Detroit) and 2 (Buffalo).
Niagara Falls USA by bus and foot
My Toronto friends have a habit of pulling a particular face when I deign to suggest making a trip to Niagara. It’s the exact same face that a certain kind of person (of which I confess to being one of) will give you if you mention a desire to visit the number one overcrowded tourist trap near their place.
If someone is visiting my neck of the woods I’ll probably dish out unsolicited advice that goes something like this…
“Bondi? Why? Bronte’s way nicer.”
“The Three Sisters? Well, up to you but definitely don’t go on the weekend.”
“The Hunter Valley? You mean Cessnock Heights!?” (jk who doesn’t love a wine region)
and for some Canadian flavour:
“Lake Louise? You know the Rockies is full of lakes that are just as epic and aren’t so popular you need to prebook a shuttle from the park and ride just to get there?”
So when I got this feedback on Niagara I could safely discount it as local’s bias and get on with planning my trip.
Niagara Falls, Canada or Niagara Falls, USA?
The first thing that will come up when you mention you are planning a trip to Niagara Falls is that the person who has been there before will tell you you simply must go to the Canadian side. I’m sure this bias is much stronger north of the border, but even tripadvisor seems to agree.
One thing I overheard, read online and was told countless times was that the all-important iconic view of the Falls is from Canada and that that is really the only side to see the Falls from.
That was more than enough to send me gleefully rushing straight to the American side. After all, what’s more rustbelt than the more-rundown, less-loved version of an already tacky tourist attraction?
Transit from Buffalo to Niagara
Thanks, once again, to the general perception and approach of American transit agencies to being a safety net for the poor rather than a desirable means of transport competitive with the car, I was able to bag another brilliant transit deal: a $5 day pass within the Buffalo-Niagara region.
The Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority runs buses in the Buffalo-Niagara area as well as Buffalo’s lone light rail line.
To get from Buffalo to Niagara Falls there are a couple of express options at various times of day, one of which goes to a suburban mall rather than Downtown Niagara. If in doubt, the hourly all-stops works well enough.
I rode the hourly 40 all-stops bus and it was decently popular. Riders were mostly locals using the intervening stops, but there was an Amish-looking father and son making their way to the Falls with a paper timetable in hand. I haven’t seen a paper timetable in years, but it will surprise absolutely no one that I used to have a not-insubstantial collection of Newcastle bus and train timetables to my name.
I’ve had a couple of conversations online with people who seem to think up to date route and timetable information at bus stops is basically pointless because ‘there’s an app for that’. This is frustrating to me because it comes from a place of assuming that everyone both wants and is able to be constantly connected. Is it really good policy for a public service to only provide information to people with a smartphone and an active internet connection?
It is a much smaller subsection of society that are unable to figure out when the next bus is coming from a simple paper timetable embedded in a bus stop and it doesn’t seem like that much to provide.
But I digress. As someone who mostly travels without mobile internet (“Could I also grab the wifi password?”) I must admit that our modern world is a trickier place to navigate sans internet than it once was. Few cities let you access their bikeshare programs without an active internet connection (shout out to a notable exception – Vancouver), getting a taxi now all but requires one and paper timetables are a thing of the past, or so I thought.
It was nice to see a father and son on a trip to enjoy an iconic national monument and a transit agency that understands the diverse needs of their constituency. I also enjoyed listening to a couple carrying cans of drink, an enormous plastic bag full of clothes and much else besides, give generous and probably too specific advice to the Amish duo. It was a wholesome American transit scene.
Arriving in Niagara Falls, USA
Stepping off in Niagara the joy continued. I was most surprised to see that the American side is beautiful in its own right and very, very popular. I had forgotten that the majority of US Americans don’t have passports and Niagara is an important nation-building pilgrimage! In fact, Buffalo was the first city in the world lit up by electricity thanks to Nikola Tesla’s brain (there is a statue of the man in each city, the Buffalo one is handily located right by the Downtown bus stop) and the incredible power of the Falls.
Middle America was out in full force. Black, white, brown, Amish, you name it. The people watching rivalled the incredible majesty of the famous falls.
Hiking the Niagara Gorge
After ducking into a tourist information centre and being told it was “too far to walk” to the Niagara Power Vista I decided to take it upon myself to walk there. The Power Vista was about the only tourist attraction in the town that appealed to me – a museum to the city’s hydroelectric past, present and future housed in a functioning dam just north of the city. The dam was built by Robert Moses, who must’ve taken a well earned break from trying to ruin NYC with stroads and freeways to duck upstate and expand the role of hydro in the region.
For fans of awe inspiring natural beauty and post-industrial decay I cannot speak highly enough of this walk. Within minutes of leaving the Falls I was riding an elevator that was once part of a huge power station that had been destroyed by the water it was supposed to be harnessing. The river was fast flowing and devoid of watercraft, thanks to the enormous rapids downstream that limit access. I had been expecting to spend the day at what is functionally a carnival and instead had stumbled my way into a majestic gorge that played a momentous role in the industrial history of the United States.
I took loads of photos (few other activities provoke this response), enjoyed the company of many birds and a couple of snakes, wandered about the graffiti-covered rusting relics and generally followed any distraction that grabbed my eyes. This unfortunately meant that I was running a bit tight to closing time of the Power Vista centre which, as described, was really far away.
At Devil’s Hole State Park I found this old freeway lane that had been cut off from the adjacent highway and turned into a bike lane that ran the last mile to the museum. As I got closer I realised that the museum footbridge across the freeway did not include access onto my bike/pedestrian road. I thought about jumping various fences but this is a huge, functioning hydroelectricity producing facility in America and I didn’t want to get shot. There I stood, mere metres from the museum but more than 2km away on foot. It was half an hour to close so I gave up and trudged back to the park to rest my weary feet and figure out how to get home.
To catch a bus you have to think like a bus.
Waiting at Devil’s Hole State Park for a bus poses a tricky situation if you don’t have access to the internet. The obvious solution would be to just buy a goddamn sim card (adding roaming to my Canadian sim was prohibitively expensive) but I’m going to set that solution aside because: 1, I don’t want to and 2, I personally think that a public transport system should be usable without one.
At Devil’s Hole State Park there are three bus stops for three different bus routes, none which have a printed timetable.
The first is a dinky tourist shuttle that runs back to Downtown and leaves from the car park (top left). This has no timetable so you can’t really plan ahead with it. Apparently it runs roughly every 40 minutes and you can track the buses on the app or in your browser, but I was wandering about roughly along its route all day and I can’t say I ever saw one…
On the nearby street there are bus stops on either side for route 52. The 52 runs at an irregular frequency of anywhere between 30 and 120 minutes between services. The route is a big loop that takes 40 minutes to complete. This meant that whichever side I got a bus from it would be between 10 and 30 minutes to Downtown. I was vaguely aware of some of this (I had done a small amount of research before I wandered off downstream) so I knew that whichever side got a bus first, that was the one I wanted to be on.
I found myself a good spot on the grass where I could eye off all three bus stops and I waited. It took around 30 minutes until the more direct 52B came along, which, all things considered, I feel like worked out reasonably well. I swiped my day pass and headed back to Downtown Niagara Falls. Well, almost. The Portage Transit Centre where the 52B and other suburban bus routes terminate is awkwardly located at the edge of Downtown in a kind of run down supermarket carpark. So I had to walk the rest of the way to the trendy (for the area…) 3rd Street to get some dinner. I was absolutely starving after all of this and thankfully all-you-can-eat Indian seems to be a trend in Niagara.
I left the restaurant stuffed like a turkey with some time to chill before my all-stops bus back to Buffalo. I had just started gently perambulating to aid my digestion when I spotted an unexpected express bus which I felt the need to awkwardly attempt to run for. I was back in Buffalo all of thirty minutes later extremely satisfied with the day’s undertakings – and I hadn’t even gone to the casino!
Carry on to the fourth and final part 4: the Erie Canal.
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