Making Sense of D.C.’s Better Bus Route Numbers

maps
DC
Published

July 9, 2025

Like many D.C. residents, I’ve been trying to understand WMATA’s totally new Better Bus Network routes.

Every route has at the very least a new name. Some were completely overhauled. S2 is now (mostly)…D60? I couldn’t figure out any rhyme or reason to the new route numbers. So I mapped them.

Turns out that In D.C. the routes are pretty much numbered from highest in the west to lowest in the east. A pattern! Here’s a simplified little map of the new network.

Map of bus routes in DC showing that the routes are generally numbered from highest in the west to lowest numbers in the east.

Besides the numbers, routes that are mostly in D.C. start with D for Downtown or C for Crosstown (cute.) WMATA routes in the suburbs — not shown here — start with A (Alexandria or Arlington), F (Fairfax City, Fairfax County, or Falls Church), M (Montgomery County), or P (Prince George’s County).

Tech notes: I grabbed the route data from WMATA’s API and made this quick map using tidytransit, sf, and ggplot2 in R.