Bus terminus

A bus terminus is a designated place where a bus or coach starts or ends its scheduled route. The terminus is the designated place that a timetable is timed from. Termini can be located at bus stations, interchanges, bus garages or simple bus stops. Termini can both start and stop at the same place, or may be in different locations for starting and finishing a route. Termini may or may not coincide with the use of bus stands.

For operational reasons and passenger routes to be their bus garage, where the legal terminus is just outside or nearby. For the purposes of integration of different public transport modes, termini may also be located in a transportation hub or 'interchange'. Minor termini may be a simple bus stop or loop in a residential street, used by very few or just one.

While it may be of prime importance to the passenger, the location of a terminus may be made for reasons other than convenience of passengers.

In rare cases, where the bus operator is commercially separate from the bus station owner, the bus company may choose to terminate services outside the station, so as not to incur usage fees. Additionally, counter to the idea of integration, competing bus operators may use different locations as intermediate termini, to discourage passengers use of competitors services.

A factor in the location of a terminus is how to turn the bus around to start the route in the other direction, which may be difficult in areas where road space is an issue, or the road layout prevents U-turns. This does not apply for true circle routes, where buses simply operate permanently in the clockwise or anti-clockwise direction. Termini in bus stations will often include reversing/run-around space, negating the turning issue.

Another consideration about the location of a terminus is the need to lay over before resuming in service.

In busy locations, such as main streets or bus stations, allowing the bus the space to lay over may not be appropriate, and the bus may have to run out of service, to a quieter layover point, before returning to the terminus to start the route again.

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