Why do buses get their own special lane?

Have you ever sat in a car that crawled along, stop and go, stop and go? Maybe you pressed your nose to the cool window and watched a big bus roll right past you. It was driving in a red strip of road with the words bus only painted on it.

Why does the bus get that lane all to itself, when everyone else has to wait? Let's find out together, one step at a time.

Every morning, lots of grown-ups drive to work and lots of children ride to school, all at the same time. That busy time is called rush hour, which means the time of day when the most people travel. During rush hour, the roads fill up with cars.

Now peek inside those cars. Most of them carry only one or two people, yet each car takes up a whole piece of road. Soon the cars stand bumper to bumper, and that is a traffic jam.

A bus is different. One bus can carry about fifty people, as many as a long line of cars would hold. So one bus moves lots of people in very little road space.

But in a rush hour traffic jam, the bus gets stuck too. Now fifty people sit and wait, held back by cars that carry one or two each.

So the people who plan the city's roads give the bus a lane of its own, marked bus only. Cars stay out of that lane, so the bus can roll past the traffic jam. What do you think the people waiting at the next bus stop will notice?

Their bus arrives when it should! Every bus follows a timetable, which means a list of times when the bus should reach each stop. In its own lane, the bus can keep to its timetable, even in rush hour.

Think about all those people on board. When one bus moves freely, fifty people get to work and school on time, not only one or two. That is why one lane just for buses helps so many people at once.

Rush hour, timetable. During rush hour, cars fill the roads, so a bus lane lets one bus carry lots of people past the traffic jam and keep to its timetable.

Next time you see a bus glide by in its own lane, you can smile and know how many people it is carrying home.