Big changes for your bus trips

Well, fasten your seatbelts!

Except you can’t. There aren’t seatbelts on Winnipeg Transit buses, but you know what we mean.

Tomorrow starts the biggest set of changes at Winnipeg Transit in years: in reality, the first full-scale revamp of transit routes and services that any transit user is likely to be able to remember. The old route map has been torn up: there are hardly any surviving legacy routes, and it’s a new era for Winnipeg bus travel.

The process has been unrolling slowly for several years, with transit officials designing a new feeder system, seeking input on proposed route changes, followed by a final route plan and a redrafted Navigo app, transit signs for new routes being installed, and temporary signs listing the routes that will be vanishing tomorrow.

The idea changes the entire structure of the system, moving to a main “spine” Primary Transit Network and feeder system that promises sufficiently frequent buses that riders won’t need to schedule their trips and connections that thread out into different parts of the community from those “spine” routes.

It’s a lot different from the system that’s in place now, but the goal is a familiar one — to get you from here to there as quickly and easily as possible.

There will be problems. There will be hiccups. There will be angry passengers and frustrations. You can’t massively overhaul a system that had just under 67 million riders in 2024 and not have issues arise.

Heck, the system will be brand new for bus drivers, too, and there are something like 1,100 of them who will have to get up to speed all at once. (A quick note here: bus drivers didn’t devise this new system, and if you’re angry about the changes, you’ve got no right to take it out on them, even if they are the first and only face of Winnipeg Transit you see in the flesh.)

But keep this in mind: most of the changes to Winnipeg’s bus system in recent years have been incremental, building on a foundation that hasn’t changed greatly while the needs of a changing demographic certainly have. The system, where it worked well, worked well in spite of itself, not because of carefully managed and planned change.

This is different.

So, now to the “what’s next?” part.

No one sets out to deliberately make things worse: there will be winners and losers, commutes that take more time for some riders and, hopefully, more routes that take less. But the whole process has been undertaken in an attempt to improve transit for the largest number of riders possible.

Winnipeg Transit is making quite a few claims about the benefits of the new system. “You’ll benefit from a route network that’s more … Frequent: Buses arrive more often on frequent routes. Direct: Major routes are straighter, fewer take slow and winding paths. Connected: Service expands into new areas, and bus stops move to improve connections. Simplified: Routes are easier to figure out.” At least, that’s what the website says,

That does all remain to be seen. But the changes are the result of a careful process, one that has tried to deliver the most benefits possible for the most people.

Do that hardest of things: if you’re inconvenienced or confused at the beginning, try to give the new system the benefit of the doubt as kinks are worked out and you get used to how it can work for you.

And be patient: at least at this point, Winnipeg Transit intends to keep this iteration of its bus routes and schedules in place for a full year before making significant changes.

Enjoy the ride.