Starting on Sunday, Nashville’s bus system will extend service hours and pick up riders more frequently on some of its most popular routes.

The WeGo transit agency will begin running buses until midnight, Monday through Saturday, on nine major corridors. Riders should also notice buses coming through more often. Multiple other routes will add hours on Saturdays and Sundays.

Specifics about all of the route changes are online at WeGoTransit.com and summarized in this PDF.

The changes follow years of requests from bus riders. Service workers, in particular, have been asking for buses to run later into the night, to address the problem of getting a bus ride into work but not having a ride home at the end of the shift.

But in 2019, the agency eliminated eight routes and cut overall hours by 7%.

By 2020, officials were hoping to bounce back and had proposed longer hours and more frequency. Instead, the pandemic took out a huge chunk of ridership, and the funding wasn’t available for improvements. WeGo now says ridership on its busiest routes has mostly bounced back and the agency wants to pick up on its goal of attracting more riders through more useful service.

The agency says the improvements will cost about $4.45 million. That amount includes the longer hours, higher frequency and improvements to WeGo’s Access service for residents with disabilities.