A night bus service or owl service is a public transport bus service

Public transport bus service

Bus services play a major role in the provision of public transport. These services can take many forms, varying in distance covered and types of vehicle used, and can operate with fixed or flexible routes and schedules...

 which operates through the night time hours. Many cities operate such services, either in addition to or in substitution for ordinary daytime bus services or rapid transit

Rapid transit

A rapid transit, underground, subway, elevated railway, metro or metropolitan railway system is an electric passenger railway in an urban area with a high capacity and frequency, and grade separation from other traffic. Rapid transit systems are typically located either in underground tunnels or on...

 rail services which may shut for maintenance or due to lack of passenger volumes at night.

Twenty-four hour rapid transit operation is practiced in some cities, which renders these services unneeded. Night bus service is generally much more limited in geographic coverage than daytime services, there are usually fewer lines and routes may run over entirely different paths to daytime services, or the night bus terminus

Bus terminus

A bus terminus is a designated place where a bus or coach starts or ends its scheduled route. The terminus is the designated place that a timetable is timed from. Termini can be located at bus stations, interchanges, bus garages or simple bus stops. Termini can both start and stop at the same...

 may be in a different place. Some networks may run longer routes than daytime services, which may use interchanges to reach the same outlying districts. Night services usually also run less frequently.

The difference in services may be prefixed with an "N" for Night bus, or otherwise specially branded compared to the daytime services. Another common way of distinguishing them from their daily counterparts are dark-colored line numbers. Some night services may be provided by virtue of operating some routes as 24-hour services. Some cities apply a different night bus fare structure to the daytime services. Some services may allow users to alight at a requested place of stopping rather than at specific bus stop

Bus stop

A bus stop is a designated place where buses stop for passengers to board or leave a bus. These are normally positioned on the highway and are distinct from off-highway facilities such as bus stations. The construction of bus stops tends to reflect the level of usage...

s in deference to passenger concerns about safely walking long distances.

Because of much longer intervals than in daily services, night bus lines often offer guarantee transfers to other lines or transit modes (such as trams). To ease the planning many cities use a central hub where all lines converge at a specific time. This makes the line map of many night services look like a wheel with radial lines to the center and some additional lines connecting the outer ends (or running along a ring road outside of the city center).

Examples

• Bus services in Hong Kong use the prefix "N" to identify overnight bus routes.

• Night buses in London are after-hours versions of their daytime numerical equivalents, normally running the same route but with extensions at either end of the service. The route number is prefixed with an "N" to signify a night route.

• On the Melbourne bus network
  Buses in Melbourne
  Buses in Melbourne, Australia, are a major form of public transport in Melbourne, with an extensive bus network. The network of 323 bus routes is operated by a number of privately owned bus companies....
  
   special "NightRider" services operate on weekends.

• The night service is named Blue Night Network
  Blue Night Network
  The Blue Night Network is the overnight public transit service operated by the Toronto Transit Commission in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The network consists of a basic grid of 22 bus and 2 streetcar routes, distributed so that almost all of the city is within 2 km of at least one...
  
   in Toronto, All Nighter
  All Nighter
  The All Nighter is a night bus service network in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Portions of the service shadow the rapid transit and commuter rail services of BART and Caltrain, which are the major rail services between San Francisco, the East Bay, the Peninsula, and San Jose...
  
   in San Francisco, Noctilien
  Noctilien
  Noctilien is the night bus service in Paris and its agglomeration. It is managed by the Syndicat des transports d'Île-de-France , the Île-de-France regional public transit authority, and operated by RATP and SNCF...
  
   in Paris,

• See also the separate night bus network of Edinburgh Night Bus, First Manchester Nightbus, Go North East Night Buses, Vancouver NightBus.

In literature

• The London night bus was the inspiration for J. K. Rowling
  J. K. Rowling
  Joanne "Jo" Rowling, OBE , better known as J. K. Rowling, is the British author of the Harry Potter fantasy series...
  
  's Knight Bus.
• Chicago Surface Lines Owl Service was part of the inspiration for Carl Sandburg
  Carl Sandburg
  Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."-Biography:Sandburg was born in Galesburg,...
  
  's "Old Woman" (1916). "The owl-car clatters along, dogged by the echo..." He also refers to Owl Service in "Blue Island Intersection" (1922). "The owl car blutters along in a sleep-walk." A further reference is found in "Nights Nothings Again" (1922). "A taxi whizzes by, an owl car clutters, passengers yawn reading street signs..." In "A Streetcar Named Desire" Act II Scene II (1947), Mitch tells Blanche how he'll get home: "I'll walk over to Bourbon and catch an owl-car."