Washington DC/Better Bus Network
This page is meant to serve as a place to track our progress on creating new bus route relations following WMATA's approval of the Better Bus Network. The new routes will go into effect in mid-2025, so please don't add these bus routes until then. The DC mapping community has not yet decided whether it makes more sense to rework existing bus route relations or just start from scratch (it may make sense to do a combination of these depending on the route). When you complete a bus relation, please reference the new or updated OSM element using the relation template (by using {{Relation:###}}), so that it's easy to click to open it.
Resources and guidance
All the new routes are described on WMATA's website. As of late 2024, only PDF files of all the routes in each jurisdiction are available. If GTFS becomes available, that may make our lives easier. For each route relation, make sure to add the following tags at minimum:
- type=route
- route=bus
- ref=*, which will correspond to the route code in the table below
- NSI tags for Metrobus, which should be automatically available in your editor of choice
Stops
The new bus routes will prioritize frequency over coverage, and thus WMATA is planning to remove around 500 "underused" bus stops. These stops will probably have to be removed in one fell swoop with a conflation of existing OSM data and WMATA's new stop data after the switchover. WMATA and DCGIS have usually been good about publishing stop data like this publicly, so this will be a matter of waiting for that to drop.
Routes
| Metrobus route | OSM relation |
|---|---|
| A11 | |
| A12 | |
| A1X | |
| A27 | |
| A28 | |
| A29 | |
| A40 | |
| A49 | |
| A58 | |
| A70 | |
| A71 | |
| A90 | |
| C11 | |
| A76 | |
| C13 | |
| C15 | |
| C17 | |
| C21 | |
| C22 | |
| C23 | |
| C25 | |
| C27 | |
| C29 | |
| C31 | |
| C33 | |
| C35 | |
| C43 | |
| C51 | |
| C53 | |
| C41 | |
| C55 | |
| C57 | |
| C63 | |
| C61 | |
| C71 | |
| C81 | |
| C83 | |
| C85 | |
| C87 | |
| D12 | |
| D14 | |
| D1X | |
| D22 | |
| D24 | |
| D2X | |
| D30 | |
| D32 | |
| D34 | |
| D36 | |
| D42 | |
| D44 | |
| D46 | |
| D4X | |
| D52 | |
| D54 | |
| D62 | |
| D6X | |
| D70 | |
| D72 | |
| D74 | |
| D82 | |
| D90 | |
| D92 | |
| D94 | |
| D96 | |
| F10 | |
| F19 | |
| F20 | |
| F23 | |
| F24 | |
| F26 | |
| F28 | |
| F29 | |
| F44 | |
| F50 | |
| F60 | |
| F62 | |
| F64 | |
| F66 | |
| F81 | |
| F83 | |
| F85 | |
| M10 | |
| M12 | |
| M20 | |
| M22 | |
| M42 | |
| M44 | |
| M52 | |
| M62 | |
| M6X | |
| M70 | |
| P10 | |
| M82 | |
| P11 | |
| P12 | |
| P13 | |
| P14 | |
| P1X | |
| P20 | |
| P21 | |
| P22 | |
| P23 | |
| P24 | |
| P30 | |
| P31 | |
| P32 | |
| P33 | |
| P35 | |
| P40 | |
| P41 | |
| P42 | |
| P43 | |
| P44 | |
| P52 | |
| P53 | |
| P54 | |
| P55 | |
| P51 | |
| P56 | |
| P57 | |
| P5X | |
| P60 | |
| P61 | |
| P62 | |
| P63 | |
| P64 | |
| P65 | |
| P66 | |
| P71 | |
| P72 | |
| P73 | |
| P76 | |
| P77 | |
| P78 | |
| P83 | |
| P84 | |
| P85 | |
| P86 | |
| P87 | |
| P88 | |
| P93 | |
| P94 | |
| P95 | |
| P96 | |
| P97 |
Notes
According to the Washingtonian, the first letter of the route describes the area it’s in— “D” or “C” for, well, DC routes, “P” for Prince George’s County, “M” for Montgomery County, “A” for Alexandria and Arlington, and “F” for Fairfax and Falls Church. The second character, a number, describes the neighborhood the route runs in, and the third character is either a number, labeling the route within its cluster, or the letter X, to denote that it is an express, limited-stop route. You can learn more about the Better Bus initiative here.