One of the few things the Southern California Rapid Transit District ever got right was renumbering their bus lines in the early 80's. Before then many of the route numbers where either from the private companies that came before it or numbers that just happened to be available.
After the route renumbering all you had to do was look at the route number and you had the general idea of where the bus was going. While I have not seen the UTA's plan for restructuring the bus system (boy are they keeping that a secret) here is my idea on renumber the bus routes in order to make the bus system easier to understand and better for the choice riders and first time riders it needs to reach.
One of the problems of the present system is that once again many of the route numbers are from the streetcar days and have no bearing on today's world.
Route Numbers: Route Information:
1-50 Local Routes too and from Downtown Salt Lake City
100-149 Local Routes not going through downtown traveling mostly east/west
150-199 Local Routes not going through downtown traveling mostly north/south
200-299 Night Rides
300-349 Salt Lake County Express Routes traveling to downtown
350-399 Salt Lake County Express Routes not traveling to downtown
400-499 Limited Stop Routes (such as BRT)
500-549 Intercounty Express Routes (present lines 72, 73, 801, etc)
550-599 Intercounty Local Routes (present line 70, etc)
600-624 Ogden Area Local Lines
625-649 North Davis Area Local Lines
650-699 Weber/North Davis Express Routes
800-849 Utah County Local Lines
850-899 Utah County Express Routes
This renumbering system would make the UTA even easier to use. With the growth in Utah and Weber Counties you could even break up the routes further when more routes are added in the father reaches of the counties.
Also, this route renumber would leave plenty of room for the expansion of bus service in the future.
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