Greater Portland Metro is changing its routes to improve service between downtown Portland, the jetport and The Maine Mall.

The changes, which were implemented last week, are designed to make the bus service from downtown to the mall faster and make service to and from the jetport more reliable and abundant, according to Mike Tremblay, the director of transit development.

Route 7, which used to run from Falmouth to downtown Portland, now goes all the way to the jetport.

Route 5 now bypasses a stop at the jetport on its way between downtown Portland to the Maine Mall. Without that deviation, Tremblay said, the route is now more efficient, cutting off about five to eight minutes.

“Sometimes we’d do that deviation and we didn’t pick anybody up, either,” Tremblay said.

“What this accomplishes is now those riders don’t have to worry about making those deviations – they can just go straight to the mall,” said Andrew Clark, the transit program manager for Greater Portland Council of Governments.

The council conducted a study in 2022 called “Transit Together,” which recommended ways the seven main transit agencies in the Portland area could be more connected. Its results partly informed Metro’s route changes, Clark said.

Now that Route 7 goes to the jetport, ground transportation to and from the airport is more frequent and consistent. Only a fraction of the trips on the old Route 5 stopped at the jetport each day, Tremblay said.

“(One) goal with the service change … was to provide a consistent level of service to the jetport so that every single trip on a certain route does go to the jetport every single day and you don’t have to look at the schedule, and so that’s what we did with Route 7,” he said.

He said these changes will benefit all Metro riders, not just those going to the jetport.

“There’s more service along Congress Street,” he said. “If your primary focus is going from, say, Maine (Medical Center) to Washington (Avenue), that’s another option that wasn’t there before. So even if you’re not going to Falmouth or the jetport, it becomes an option for more people.”

For jetport employee Gabriella Guardado, 50, who uses the bus to commute each day, Route 7 is much more reliable.

“Now that Route 7 is coming to the jetport every hour, on the hour, it’s totally convenient,” Guardado said on Monday from her seat on the bus home from work. “It really helps with my work schedule. I feel more at ease now. If I have to stay over, I don’t have to wait or walk outside of the jetport to ride the bus.”

Service to and from the airport also now starts about 30 minutes earlier and later in the day than Route 5 did on weekdays. Route 7’s first arrival at the airport is at 5:40 a.m. and its last departure is at 9:50 p.m.

Paul Bradbury, the director of the jetport, said the new hours will help many, but not all, of the passengers.

It gives “hourly connectivity, which is significantly better than the select trips that we had under Route 5,” Bradbury said. “That said … we have passengers who start arriving at nearly 4 a.m., or even a little earlier for that first outbound, which can be as early as 5:15. And then the inbound arrivals – those last terminators are in as late as midnight if it’s a regular operation, so it’s still a challenge.”

Bradbury said he does not expect the route changes to lower demand for the jetport’s long-term parking, which is increasingly scarce.

“We don’t believe the long-term parkers are generally within the Greater Portland Metro,” Bradbury said. “Where we serve is the entire state of Maine and into Canada and north and western New Hampshire, and there’s just no public transit to capture that whole impact.”

Bradbury does think that the route changes may reduce the number of vehicles coming through.

“Many people allow a friend or neighbor to drop them off. They might choose to use the bus now, right? Because it will reduce the number of trips to the airport, it will reduce ground transportation and congestion.”

The changes, which are funded by the American Rescue Plan Act, are part of a series of efforts by Metro to bring ridership back to 2019 levels.

In May, Metro had close to 164,000 riders, which was significantly higher than the 149,000 riders they had in May 2023, but still down from the 186,000 they had in May 2019, according to data provided by Tremblay.

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