2013 won’t be the year of the bus. We’ve got that part figured out; the nuts and bolts and steel part. Instead, 2013 will be the year of the regional transit. We’re reaching out further than ever before and making bold plans to get folks moved to exactly where they want to go right when they want to get there. As downtown and its surrounding neighborhoods surge and swell, the issue of transit gets more and more crucial each day. Killer solutions like M1 Light Rail and Bus Rapid Transit are indeed on the way, but even once those are in place in a handful of years that’ll only serve a small portion of the total current and huge future demand.

So we’re retooling. It’s always been our mission and our dream to tackle Detroit’s largest transit problems, but we had to start somewhere simpler. We set our sights on the nightlife market at the start because it was a problem we could wrap our arms around just twice a week. We worked extremely hard to find what worked and what didn’t — and, eventually, a really rad, usable service emerged that moved hundreds each month. But we can’t do it all. We’re still a small company and, even after our explosive first year of growth and new friends, we still believe it’s very important to do fewer things really, really well.

With that, we’re ending our Friday and Saturday night public bar service for now. Instead, we’re doing a monthly bar crawl between Downtown, Midtown and Corktown every last Saturday of the month. It’ll be just $10, the loop will be under 20 minutes and we’ll throw a bunch of buses on it so the wait times will be almost zero. Details on that new crawl are right here and it starts this January 26th. Groupon and LivingSocial passes will be honored in full on this new crawl.

In its place, we’ve launched a handful of really exciting initiatives that we hope will totally change what you thought possible with public transit:

First up, Take Back the Commute. So much of our time these days is spent driving into and back from work; sometimes upwards of an hour. With more and more of us working downtown, our system of freeways and major roads have reached a breaking point long ago. We want to give you back that time and get you right from your neighborhood to the front door of your office in one shot. We’re working with a number of companies in the Downtown and Midtown communities to make this a reality very soon.

Next, The West Side Connection. The communities of Plymouth, Canton and Northville have opted out of public transit. While this doesn’t affect the majority of people in that region, there’s a great number of good people there that’re completely stranded because of disability or financial strain. We’re working on one of the nation’s first subscription-based transit system to fill these gaps.

Finally, HAMDOT. Hamtramck is bursting at the seams with new life and new residents but getting there is tough with a car and impossible without one. We’re working on a free 7-day-a-week shuttle bus that’ll run between Hamtramck, New Center, Midtown and Downtown to get Hamtramck to work and Detroit to fun times. This is an ambitious plan, certainly, but so is this feisty little historic ‘burg.

Head over to our Public Services page to learn more about these initiatives and take a survey if you’re interested in riding on one of one of these fresh new projects.

Also, we have a great deal of really incredible tours and special events planned for the next two months that’ll get you to more unique places, more rare experiences and more new people than ever before. The list of those is right here.