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Valley Metro Bus

Transport system in Maricopa County, Arizona From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Valley Metro Bus
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Valley Metro Bus is the public transit bus service in Maricopa County, Arizona, United States. Valley Metro Bus provides local, regional, express, and rural bus services in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area (as well as the community of Ajo in Pima County), covering a service area of 525 sq mi (1,360 km2). In 2024, the system had a ridership of 25,892,000, or about 88,600 per weekday in the second quarter of 2025.

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Valley Metro, officially known as the Valley Metro Regional Public Transportation Authority, is responsible for coordinating the bus system. Bus services are operated by private contractors and individual municipalities in the Phoenix area, branded as Valley Metro.

All Valley Metro Bus services are accessible to persons with disabilities, with ramps or lifts installed on all buses. Additionally, all fixed-route buses are equipped with bicycle racks.

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Operations

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There are over 100 bus routes contracted by Valley Metro, including regular routes, limited-stop routes, and community circulators. Bus frequency, hours, and days of operation vary by route. The most heavily used routes have peak service frequency of every 10 minutes and run as late as 1:00 am,[7] while less used routes run every 30 minutes off-peak, with service ending at midnight.

Route types and naming conventions

There are currently 60 local bus routes that form Valley Metro's super-grid bus system. They are numbered roughly according to the address on the Phoenix area's street grid on which they travel. For example:

  • Route 35 is a north–south route which runs along 35th Avenue, which is the 3500 block, west, on the street grid.
  • Route 0 runs north–south along Central Avenue, which is the dividing street or "zero point" separating east and west Phoenix on the street grid.
  • Route 50 runs east–west along Camelback Road, which is the 5000 block, north, on the street grid
  • Route 72 runs north–south along Scottsdale and Rural Roads, which are the 7200 block, east, on the street grid.
  • Route 104 runs north–south along Alma School Road, which corresponds to the 10400 block, east, on the street grid (but not in the city of Mesa itself, which uses a different street numbering/zero point origin from the city of Phoenix).
  • Routes 7 and 8 each run on 7th Street and 7th Avenue respectively. Given that Phoenix has numbered thoroughfares designated as "Avenues" west of Central and "Streets" east of Central, Route 8 is one digit higher to avoid confusion with Route 7 which are both the 700 blocks.
  • Route 17 runs east–west along McDowell Road, which actually is the 1600 block, north, on the street grid. Route 17 is one digit higher to avoid confusion with Route 16, which runs north–south along 16th Street which is the 1600 block, east, on the street grid.
  • Route 81 runs north-south on Hayden Road and McClintock Drive, which is the 8000 block, east, on the street grid. Route 81 is one digit higher to avoid confusion with Route 80, which runs east-west along Northern Avenue, which is the 8000 block, north, on the street grid.

The community circulator routes are mostly a free service, the exceptions being the Avondale Zoom routes with a 50 cent fare each; formerly the Glendale Urban Shuttle (GUS) routes had a 25 cent fare each to ride; this fare was eliminated on October 23, 2017. They supplement the standard grid service with routes that connect neighborhoods to nearby business districts. Circulator vehicles are typically minibusses, with the Avondale Zoom routes, Scottsdale Trolley routes, and select Tempe Orbit routes using mid-size buses and the DASH circulator serving Downtown Phoenix using 40-foot buses. The naming convention varies by the communities they serve, such as the Scottsdale Neighborhood Trolley, Tempe Orbit Jupiter, and Phoenix SMART.

The LINK routes were limited-stop, streamlined bus connections to transit centers served by Valley Metro Rail. These routes used upgraded bus shelters that have LED "Next Bus" signs and bus rapid transit-styled vehicles with traffic signal priority. They were named after the street they travel on. The two routes were the Main Street LINK and the Arizona Avenue LINK. LINK service was discontinued on October 24, 2016, and was replaced by enhanced local service on Routes 40 and 112.

The six RAPID routes are limited-stop commuter routes in the city of Phoenix that travel from Park and Ride lots in outlying neighborhoods near major freeways to RAPID stops in the downtown business core (including the Arizona State Capitol complex). These routes are mostly named for the freeway on which they travel, such as RAPID I-10 East and South Mountain RAPID routes (two routes connect newly developed neighborhoods along Baseline Road with downtown via 19th Avenue or 24th Street). They are unidirectional, traveling toward downtown in the morning and out of downtown in the afternoons. These routes use NABI 45C-LFW suburban buses with a special paint scheme.

The express routes are also limited-stop commuter routes. They operate similarly to the RAPID routes, from outlying Park and Ride lots and pick-up points in suburban areas outside the city of Phoenix, with higher fares than standard routes, but the same as RAPID routes. They are numbered in the 500s, with the second digit indicating the area they serve, using the following scheme:

  • 51x – Scottsdale
  • 52x – Tempe
  • 53x – Mesa and Gilbert
  • 54x – Chandler
  • 56x – Southwest Valley (Avondale, Goodyear, Buckeye, and Tolleson)
  • 57x – Northwest Valley (Glendale, Peoria, Surprise, and Sun Cities)

These routes use a mix of bus types, ranging from transit-style buses with hard seats to "semi-suburban" buses (with highback, non-reclining seats) to full suburban buses (with a single door, luggage racks, and personal reading lights). These routes are also unidirectional, traveling into downtown Phoenix and the State Capitol in the morning (using the major freeways after traveling on surface streets for part of the trip) and out of downtown in the afternoons.

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Route list

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Routes marked with an asterisk (*) are a part of the Frequent Bus Network (15 minute-or-better headways on weekdays from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.)

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Note that the listed facility assignments for Transdev-Phoenix operated routes are normal assignments, however, routes normally operated from the South facility may occasionally be substituted with buses from the North facility and vice versa.

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Transit centers

Valley Metro Bus serves the following transit centers:[9]

Customer service

The Transit Book (known until December 2008 as the Bus Book, and mentioned above) is a schedule and map book that is updated twice yearly.

An automated next scheduled arrival service, NextRide, provides future arrival times for routes that serve a bus stop or light rail station. It includes a text messaging service as well as an online tracker.[10]

Passenger information systems

Like most major cities, all buses (except for the non-Phoenix circulator vehicles) include the Route Scout on-board passenger information system, which includes a lighted marquee displaying the correct date and time, and an audio and visual Stop Requested announcement.

Valley Metro Rail vehicles announce approaching stations and give other travel-related announcements. The RAPID bus stops as well as the former LINK bus stops include a display with real-time predictions for the next arrival at that stop. Additionally, all Valley Metro Rail platforms feature announcements for the approximate arrival of the next train.

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Valley Metro service providers

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Unification of Tempe bus operations with the RPTA

In 2012, the City of Tempe introduced a proposal that would unify its transit operations with the RPTA.[12] Under the new agreement, all Tempe bus operations would be handed over to the RPTA, where the Tempe transit facility would be utilized by the RPTA to reduce costs and improve efficiencies for certain routes by reducing deadheads due to its more central location than the existing RPTA facility in Mesa.

On November 24, 2012, the City of Tempe agreed to move forward with unifying its transit operations with the RPTA.[13] The contract for both agencies was initially planned to be awarded to First Transit on December 13, 2012, however, Veolia Transport protested the award because First Transit wasn't releasing information of where their cost savings would come from. The protest was denied and the contract was officially awarded to First Transit on January 24, 2013.[14]

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Bus fleet

Valley Metro and member cities maintain a growing fleet of over 800 vehicles for public bus routes and nearly 200 for paratransit.

Notes

  1. [a]
    Includes ridership from 0A, which was merged with 0 in July 2025.

References

External links

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