The present state: the CONNECT plan, the 2025 network, and the cuts of 2026

2023–2026 · VERIFIED TO NOVEMBER 2026

The plan: The modern system's one comprehensive re-examination is the CONNECT Transit Plan, completed in March 2023 by the Michiana Area Council of Governments with Transpo and the Interurban Trolley, led by the planning firm Jarrett Walker + Associates after nearly two years of research and public engagement. Its description of the network it inherited — the system as of 2021 — is the baseline of the present state: a network in which no route ran more often than about every thirty minutes at midday and most ran hourly, in which 78 percent of the residents of South Bend and Mishawaka lived within half a mile of some service, and in which there was, as there had always been, no service at all on Sundays. The plan produced two networks: a budget-neutral Short-Term Network to be implemented at once, and an Additional Funding Network — five routes at fifteen-minute frequency covering a third of the population — that waits on money not yet secured.

June 2025: the regional ride: The Short-Term Network went into operation on Monday 2 June 2025, when Transpo and the Interurban Trolley launched redesigned networks together, as the corporation announced that April. Its signature change closed a circle ninety years wide: Route 9, the North Side route whose streetcar ancestor had run since 1885, was replaced by Route 30, a through route giving a one-seat ride between downtown South Bend and downtown Elkhart by way of Mishawaka, jointly worked by Transpo and the Interurban Trolley — the two systems' buses meeting, as the Northern Indiana's cars once had, on the road between the cities. The joint working had been rehearsed since 20 August 2018, when the Interurban Trolley's Yellow Line began running directly between downtown Elkhart and Transpo's Mishawaka Transfer Center. As implemented, the network the agency published carried seventeen numbered routes — 1 through 8, 10 through 17, and the new 30 — plus the Gameday Express for Notre Dame football Saturdays, radiating from South Street Station and the Mishawaka Transfer Center, Monday through Saturday.

September 2026: the SEA 1 cuts: The present state, verified to November 2026, is a system contracting under a state law. On 2 September 2026 the South Bend Tribune reported changes Transpo implemented on Tuesday 8 September, in response to the funding challenges posed by Indiana's Senate Enrolled Act 1 — the property-tax reform whose caps press every Indiana transit corporation's local revenue: Route 1, the Madison/Mishawaka route, was cut back to end at 12th Street and Merrifield, and Routes 14 (Sample/Mayflower) and 15 (University Park Mall/Mishawaka) were discontinued altogether, the corporation's two lowest-productivity routes, for expected savings of $400,000 to $600,000 in the first year without layoffs. General Manager and CEO Chris Kubaszak's account to the paper was that the act had only hastened the arithmetic: "Part of the reason these services had to be changed, these service cuts, was yes, Senate Bill One, but we're not seeing any increase across the board in any state funding or local funding. Senate Bill One just made it happen sooner." Riders were carried free for the five days of the change, 8 to 12 September, as a bridge while the new pattern settled. The system that remains — fifteen numbered routes and the Gameday Express, the dollar fare, the CNG fleet at 1401 South Lafayette Boulevard, South Street Station as its hub — is the state of South Bend's public carriage at the date of this record.

The streetcar proposed again: One thread of the present record reaches back to 1885 deliberately. In May 2021 a local task force — the RiverRail group, among them a Saint Mary's professor of urban design, a former state senator, and two of the region's developers and designers — proposed bringing the electric streetcar back to South Bend: a line of approximately six miles from Notre Dame into downtown South Bend and then along Mishawaka Avenue into downtown Mishawaka, at a cost its own members put at likely more than $200 million, most of it state and federal money, with a $250,000 feasibility study by HDR Consulting as the first ask of the local governments. The proposal traded openly on the city's priority in the art — South Bend's claim to the first electric streetcars in the country is the group's founding fact. As of November 2026 the RiverRail remains what the record shows it to have been in 2021: a concept with a task force and a price estimate, no funded construction in the record reached — the streetcar's return proposed, not begun.

Sources:

1. Michiana Area Council of Governments, CONNECT Transit Plan, Final Recommendations Report, March 2023 — the existing network as of 2021 (frequencies, the 78 percent proximity figure, no Sunday service); the Short-Term and Additional Funding Networks; the Route 9 to Route 30 replacement and the one-seat South Bend–Elkhart ride.
2. Transpo and the Interurban Trolley, joint announcement of 16 April 2025 — the redesigned networks launching Monday 2 June 2025 under the CONNECT Transit Plan.
3. The South Bend Tribune, August 2018, via Mass Transit magazine — the Yellow Line Mishawaka/Elkhart joint route from 20 August 2018.
4. The South Bend Tribune, 2 September 2026 — the changes of 8 September 2026: Route 1 cut back to 12th Street and Merrifield, Routes 14 and 15 discontinued, five days of free fares, the $400,000–$600,000 savings, and General Manager Chris Kubaszak on Senate Enrolled Act 1.
5. The South Bend Tribune, 13 May 2021, via Government Technology — the RiverRail task force, its six-mile line, its cost estimate above $200 million, and the $250,000 feasibility study.
6. Transpo's published route list, as compiled in the transit record to 2026 — the seventeen numbered routes and the Gameday Express of the June 2025 network.