Efficient and Realistic Bus Lines

This guide explains how to create realistic bus lines, and how they work.

Route Planning

Be on the way
In order to have a successful bus line, it should be planned carefully considering the city and network. At the start and end of your bus line, there should be main activity centres. The best areas to have are commercial areas, universities and landmarks. At these locations it is vital to have a interchange to connect to other lines. In the space along the lines, there should be smaller activity centres such as, schools, commercial, industrial and residential areas. By having job centres at the ends of the line and commercial and education at the ends, the bus line can be used well across the entire length of the line. The distribution of passengers should be equal throughout the line, to maximise efficiency.

Use the most direct route
With potential locations in mind, the path of the bus line should be the most direct route possible. If your city has a grid, running bus lines along the grid is a straight line is far more effective than a indirect and slow line. Lines should only be A-B and almost never loops. The main shapes to use are I, L and U shapes.
The I shape offers a direct connection between two points using the straightest line possible.
The L shape is useful to connect areas off of a main corridor and in alternate directions.
The U shape is most useful for adding connections to connect other lines, and trips mostly along short sections of the line, rather than the whole line.
Example of a direct line
In this example, the bus line runs from left to right. On the right side, there is a city centre and bus interchange. On the left side it ends at a commercial area in low density residential. Along the line there is a University and schools as well as commercial zones along the main road. The line runs straight along the road and provides a fast direct connection from suburb to city.

Stop Placement

Stop Spacing
Once a route is decided for the line, one of the most important things is stop spacing. Usually what many players do is place a stop on every block to provide stops near everyone. Lines with too many stops are slow and less reliable with the AI stopping everywhere. To increase efficiency the optimal spacing for bus stops is 50 tiles or 400m. This can be as low as 40 tiles or as high as 120 for large gaps. The optimal spacing gives a balance between speed and coverage, where everywhere along the line is still close to a stop and the buses do not need to stop frequently.

Local and Rapid
One option to add extra capacity to a line is adding a rapid or express line over an existing one. If the first line stops every 50 tiles as a local service, the rapid service can stop every secong or third stop (depending on busiest stops) to give a fast service. The fast service can ease crowding on the local line and make the journey faster than driving, therefore reducing car usage. Sometimes if there is a motorway that runs a similar route and express service is useful to bypass the inner city area for outer suburbs or towns nearby.

Line Frequency

When your lines are in operation, it is important to provide enough buses for the passengers. After the line has run with 100% budget, service levels can be changed. If all buses are crowded along the line, the budget should be increased to 120 or 150% budget if required. More capacity can be added by downloading articulated or double decker buses from the workshop to carry more than 100 people. If ridership is lower than expected, the budget can be lowered to 80 or 75% to reduce costs while still operating a reliable service.
If a line is still overcrowded after increasing budget and adding larger buses, the line should be replaced with trams or metro depending on the situation. If the line is replaced, the surrounding lines should be intergrated into the metro or tram line for easy connections.

Suggested Assets and Tips

Here are some buses and bus hubs that will expand capacity.

Bus Hubs:



Nonstop Bus Terminal by Senfkorn



Bus Station by Senfkorn



Modular Bus Station by Avanya

Old Bus Depot by Avanya



Small



Large

Buses
Rigid:

Scania Citywide LF by DanDeKalb


NewFlyer XD40 by Ninjanoobslayer


Gillig 40' by ron_fu-fa

Articulated

Scania CityWide LFA by DanDeKalb


NewFlyer XD 60 by Ninjanoobslayer

[✪✪ Sgt Rakov ✪✪]

I put stops every two blocks, but my bus lines are short, because I have subway everywhere and buses are only delivering people to and from subway stations (they go in short loops that always have a stop near one). I could probably get rid of buses completely because subway is just so cheap and effective in this game.

[Eloso]

@curator23 Loop lines are usually one way and require a long trip that would be easier on point to point. If you need a loop line only short ones between less than 4 stops should be used.

[curator23]

Could you please expand on the problems with looped lines? I have a long thin loop, but I've only been playing a few hours so I don't know if it's working well or not.

[TAPOO]

good

[williammallon]

Thank you for this guide. It helps to give a better understanding of how to best use this service.

[urbanmaking]

I wish there was a much smarter AI for passengers. They don't take into account time of travelling between A and B. They always seem to choose the closest station, even if it's the crowdest bus stop which would take 2 hours, instead of a 2 blocks away metro station, where they could take a much faster trip. We need a realistic mod to rebalance the AI !

[Shurimoo]

By the way, it might just be that I was slow to realize this but in case others didn't as well: if you change the color of a line it also changes the color of the people when theyre highlighted at the stops. If you've got multiple lines sharing a single station it's pretty useful for quickly figuring out which line people are trying to get onto and then whether or not one line in particular is excessively busy.

[Shurimoo]

@Mr. Someguy I'd suggest a metro or tram line as well, although it could do well to follow the line and see if there are any stops the majority of the people are getting off at. You can also click a few of the people sitting around at the stop and see if a lot of a certain building type comes up: is everyone trying to get to work in that large commercial district you set up a couple blocks over? Is everyone arriving at this stop and filtering out to their homes? How you set up your tram/metro depends quite a lot on what the bulk of the people are doing with the bus' other stops.

[Al Hoff]

Thank you, I've never really experimented myself with getting the most out of my bussing public transport. But you hit the nail on the head with all that needs to be said.

[Eloso]

If your line is too busy you could try adding larger buses or building a tram or metro line