Whether you are contemplating the addition of new routes to an existing bus transit system, or developing an entirely new bus system in a community, you’ll need to estimate the number of users that your new routes will service. Once you have estimated where and when the demand will be present, you can design your bus transit system to service that demand.

As discussed in the chapter entitled "Travel Demand Forecasting," you can divide the area that you want to service into regions and conduct trip generation, trip distribution, and mode split analyses of the region with your proposed route structure in place. This will give you an estimate of the number of users that will decide to use your new bus route(s) instead of their current means of transportation.

Once you have this information, you can use existing traffic data and microanalysis of the regions to determine when the peak travel periods are and what specific destinations are the most common. For example, if you knew that a school was present in zone "A" and that zone "B" was primarily residential, you might deduce that a high demand for travel from zone "A" to zone "B" would exist around 3:00 PM.