COTA bus frequency & transit deserts
How often do buses actually come — and where don’t they? Every COTA stop is a dot, sized by how many trips serve it each day and colored by how long you wait between buses at peak. Search your address to find your nearest stop, or tap any dot on the map. Click a band in the legend to hide it and isolate the frequent-service network — or the deserts.
How to read this map
Each dot is a COTA stop. Its size is the average number of scheduled trips serving it each day — bigger dots are busier stops. Its color is the peak-frequency band: how many minutes you typically wait between buses during the busiest part of the day. Blue stops get a bus at least every 10–15 minutes; red stops wait more than 30. Gray stops have no computed peak frequency in the feed.
Frequency is what makes transit usable without planning your day around a timetable, so the blue network — not the raw count of stops — is the real map of where transit works. The wait shown is a typical peak headway from COTA’s schedule, not a promise for any one trip, and it says nothing about whether a bus is on time.
Source: COTA GTFS schedule data, refreshed on the transit ingest. See methodology for how frequency bands and daily trip counts are computed.