Designing demand-led bus routes

A practical walk-through for turning movement and demand data into route geometry, stop spacing and frequencies — before you commit a single bus.

Start with demand, not the map

Before drawing anything, assemble the demand evidence: origin–destination flows, boarding–alighting counts and population-density patterns. The goal is to see desire lines — where people actually want to travel — rather than where roads happen to run.

Classify every catchment

Tag each catchment as covered (service already exists and works), uncovered (real demand, no adequate service) or balanced (needs tuning). This classification tells you where to add, remove or reshape routes instead of layering new routes on top of old ones.

Draw geometry around demand

Build route alignments that connect high-demand origins and destinations with the fewest unnecessary deviations. Set stop spacing from boarding density — closer in dense zones, wider on through-sections — and avoid overlapping corridors that split the same demand across routes.

Set frequencies by time-of-day profile

Match headways to the demand profile rather than a flat all-day frequency. A route can justify a six-minute peak headway and a twenty-minute off-peak one; planning both protects both reliability and cost.