Orange County Essentials
- Use the Wave app or tap your phone or card to pay.
- Transit app is accurate.
- Buses don’t come very frequently, and often run late.
- Limited usefulness of routes. Few express routes.
Pros
- Clean
- Can be fast
- Not too crowded
- Fare capping
- Very good app
Cons
- Very poor frequency
- Comes late
- Routes not very useful
See Also
Getting Around: Los Angeles, CANovember 2024, April 2025, December 2025
Payment
OC buses have tap to pay and a new (as of 2025) app!
I opened the old OCBus app on my way to ride, and it told me that it was obsolete and I should use the new Wave app instead.
I frantically downloaded it as I power-walked to catch a bus, and it had a pretty involved setup.
You can check the clock at the top of the fifteen screenshots below to see that I speedran the setup in about five minutes.
My new card!
If you’re going to ride buses in OC, you might want to set up the app ahead of time…
OR…
You can also just Tap To Pay like in many other civilized cities such as NYC, San Diego, and Portland!
It also has fare capping! It caps daily at $4.50 with the app, or $5 with tap to pay… I guess they want to encourage you to use the app, maybe to keep from losing too much money on credit card fees.
The app didn’t tell me about tap-to-pay, so I used the app for my ride that day, and I tapped for rides the next day.
If you use the app, it shows a Remaining Transfer Time countdown, which is really slick!
The quality of the app, the ease of use, and the variety of payment are all a huge improvement over my previous visits. The bus is easy to pay for now.
Riding
Once on the bus, everything is fine. Typical bus. The distances I was traveling were often long, and it stops really frequently (my transfer point was 40 stops away), but it’s clean, feels safe, and was relatively efficient in getting there, all things considered.
One of the drivers was just ridiculously friendly and helpful on my most recent visit. Props to the friendly 50 driver!
Routes and Network
The coverage of buses in Orange County is poor. There are very few express routes, and you’ll often have to walk 15-20 minutes to get to the nearest stop. The best buses I rode ran every 40 minutes, so it was a matter of waiting at a nearby cafe until tracking showed it was nearby. A 20 minute car ride often translates to a two-hour bus ride, especially if you need to make transfers. Pretty much all of the routes are straight north-south or east-west, so a transfer is all but guaranteed.
You can also thank a bunch of astroturfing NIMBYs for killing what would have been an immensely useful light rail project in the early 2000s.
Reliability
These buses often run late. Tracking will show a bus just sitting at some spot midway through the route. (They also show it idling before the trip begins, but that’s reasonable.) I’m not sure what the bus is doing… maybe someone is having trouble getting on or off, or maybe the driver popped out for a snack or a pee, but it’s happened to me several times.
Bike Infrastructure
I do need to call out the city of Los Alamitos on their atrocity of a bike lane. Seen in the photo at right, this freshly-painted lane puts bikers in a narrow space between traffic and parked cars, and encourages them to ride as close to the parked cars as possible.
This leads them into the “door zone,” and puts them in danger of serious injury if a parked car unexpectedly opens its door.
Do better, please. Protected lanes, between the parked cars and the curb, is much better practice.
Payment: How It Used to Be
Below is a description of the old OCBus app, which has thankfully been retired as of 2025.
I paid using the OCBus app. You can buy $2 single-ride passes, or $4.50 day passes. The 4.50 pass didn’t make sense financially for my trip, but I did it anyway. It generates a QR code which you hold under a scanner when you board. My day pass scanned successfully. I’ve never gotten a single-ride pass in the app to scan successfully (the driver always just waves me on anyways).
The app is a bit of a mess to set up. It gave several inaccurate error messages when I tried to log in.
On a second visit, I bought single ride passes. The scanner did handle those all right.
The fare scanners on the bus can technically handle tap payment, but they’ve been disabled when I’ve ridden. Supposedly, buses that cross into LA county are supposed to work for taps.
