It's being called the largest-single service hour increase for Transit Windsor in a couple of decades.
City council has approved over $950,000 in the 2023 budget to allow Transit Windsor to grow existing routes, provide frequency improvements, add new routes and expand Sunday service.
In all, transit will add around 18,000 additional service hours on top of what's currently being provided.
It comes as the city bus service is reporting a 118 per cent increase in ridership compared to pre-COVID-19 figures.
One of the new routes will be the 418-X, a route will take up around 40 per cent of the service hours approved by council.
Transit Windsor executive director Tyson Cragg says the 418-X will run along the Tecumseh Road corridor and will help alleviate some of the over crowding issues on the 1C and 2 over the years.
"It's a skip stop route or a semi-express, so it's not serving every route, it's going to be major nodes or major intersections," he says. "It will help cut the travel time between east and west, and provide a lot more connections for the routes that run north-south for people to get to various places. It also provides a direct connection to the University of Windsor from the east-end terminal."
A new route will be added to provide a direct connection between the St. Clair College main campus and the Downtown Terminal, providing better connections between south Windsor and downtown, and connecting the campuses of St. Clair College.
Transit will also be expanding frequency for an area east of Lauzon Parkway.
Cragg says they currently have one route that services Forest Glade, the Lauzon 10, and the frequency isn't great.
"It's going to be replaced by three new routes that are going to originate at Tecumseh Mall and then service all those neighbourhoods east of Lauzon Parkway," he says. "What people are going to see is the bus come more often and you're going to see better connections to Tecumseh Mall. You're going to spend less time taking a tour through the neighbourhoods to get from point A to point B."
Cragg says this is probably the largest-single service hour increase that Transit Windsor has seen in a couple of decades.
"You know there's a lot of stuff that goes into this. We have to update signs and infrastructure, there's operators we need to hire, there's driver training. There's a lot of things that go into a major service plan like this," he adds.
The changes are expected to begin late spring and early summer and last until late fall and into early 2024.