It’s the start of a new era in busing in the Maritimes today as Maritime Bus officially hits the road.

Maritime Bus is expected to fill the void left behind when Acadian Lines shut down.

Mike Cassidy, president of Maritime Bus, says they’re running with maximum frequency.

“The routes are going to be very familiar to passengers, because they’re the exact routes (that Acadian had),” he explains. “What we’ve done is put more option times, more travel times, what we say in the business more frequencies, on those routes”

He adds there are two or three times as many buses as Acadian ran on the same routes.

Cassidy says the biggest challenge launching the service has been the timing.

“We received approval from both boards of public utilities, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick at the end of October, first of November,” he says. “We had an implementation program in place but you really can’t hit the streets until you have final approval and our biggest challenge was there are only 30 days in November and you had to be ready for the first of December.”

He says like any new operation, there will be some technical glitches but he says the number one goal is to get customers where they want to go.