Feature
Inside the city that rebuilt its bus network in a single weekend
On a Friday night, 140 bus routes stopped existing. By Monday morning, 38 new ones had replaced them. Ridership is up 22%.
Cities & climate reporter
10 min read
A new high-frequency line on the first Monday of the redesigned network.
For years, the city’s bus map looked like a plate of spaghetti: 140 routes, most of them running every forty minutes, many of them nearly empty.
The new network has 38 routes. Twelve of them run every eight minutes or better, all day. Planners call it “frequency over coverage,” and it is the most controversial thing the council has done in a decade.
The weekend switch
Changing a bus network gradually rarely works, planners say, because each change breaks connections that the old system depended on. So the city did it all at once. Four hundred volunteers in orange vests stood at stops on Monday morning, handing out maps and apologising.
The first week was chaotic. Complaints tripled. Then something shifted: by the third week, ridership was higher than before, and by the second month it was up 22%.
“People do not want a bus that goes everywhere. They want a bus that comes,” said the city’s head of transport planning.
Who lost out
Not everyone gained. Some residents on the city’s edge now walk ten minutes further to a stop. The council has introduced an on-demand minibus for those areas, but critics say it is a patch, not a solution.
In pictures
A new stop on one of the twelve frequent lines.
Monday morning, the first week of the new network.
Drivers rehearsed the new routes over two weekends.
Bus lanes were repainted in a single night.
Priya Raman
Cities & climate reporter
Priya reports on cities, heat and the infrastructure we will need to live with both.
