The crosstown bus map gets its first redraw in a decade
Fewer routes, straighter lines, and a promise that the ones that remain will actually come.
The draft network map released Thursday takes the city's tangle of crosstown bus routes — some tracing streetcar lines that stopped running before the war — and redraws it around a blunt trade: fewer routes, running more often.
Sixteen routes disappear. The ones that remain run on a grid, every fifteen minutes or better through the day, feeding the LRT instead of duplicating it. Planners say nine in ten current riders end up within 400 metres of frequent service; the tenth is why the public sessions will be loud.
The pattern is familiar from other cities, and so is the argument. Coverage advocates say a route you can walk to matters more than a fast one you cannot; frequency advocates answer that a bus every forty minutes is a route in name only. "A map that promises everything hourly," the project lead said, "is a map nobody can use without a spreadsheet."
Open houses run through October, with the final map to council in the spring. The fifteen-minute promise, staff confirmed, is written into the budget ask — which is where the map will actually be decided.
