Columbus Is About to Double Access to Frequent Bus Service

The transit consultant Jarrett Walker, who was brought on by COTA early in the process to help to design the new network, argued at the time that adding so many new high-frequency routes will drastically improve the experience of riding the bus in Columbus. It will make connections between routes much easier and eliminate the inconvenience of long waits, which makes people feel trapped and not in control of their journey. It is also the key to increasing overall ridership on the network, he said.

“Instead of having good service for five days and low frequencies on Saturday, and even lower on Sunday, the service will look pretty much the same seven days a week,” said Stitt. “People work on Saturdays and Sundays, so in order to make the service attractive, it’s important to add more consistent, reliable and frequent service.”

Other cities that have done similar redesigns -- like Houston, Jacksonville and Richmond, VA -- have seen big upticks in ridership on the weekends.

When COTA started, in 1974, downtown was the primary employment center in the metro area. The bus system at that time reflected that -- and was in fact largely based on old streetcar routes that dated from a time when jobs were even more clustered downtown. The new system has routes that allow a rider to travel from one suburb to the other without transferring downtown. It also increases service to large jobs centers that didn’t exist forty years ago, like Easton, Rickenbacker, and Polaris.