A bus is a large automobile intended to carry numerous persons in addition to the driver and sometimes a conductor. The name is a shortened version of Latin omnibus, which means "for everyone".

The omnibus, the first organized public transit system, may have originated in Nantes, France in 1826, when Stanislas Baudry, a retired army officer who had built public baths (run from the surplus heat from his flour mill) on the city's edge, set up a short stage line between the center of town and his baths. The service started on the Place du Commerce, outside the hat shop of M. Omnès, who displayed the motto Omnès Omnibus ("Omnès for all") on his shopfront. When Baudry discovered that passengers were just as interested in getting off at intermediate points as in patronizing his baths, he shifted the stage line's focus. His new voiture omnibus ("carriage for all") combined the functions of the hired hackney carriage with the stagecoach that travelled a predetermined route from inn to inn, carrying passengers and mail. His omnibus featured wooden benches that ran down the sides of the vehicle; entry was from the rear.

There is also a claim from the UK where in 1824 the first "bus route" is claimed to have run from Market Street in Manchester to Salford.

Whether by direct emulation, or because the idea was in the air, by 1832 the idea had been copied in Paris, Bordeaux and Lyons. A London newspaper reported in July 4, 1829 that "the new vehicle, called the omnibus, commenced running this morning from Paddington to the City". This bus service was operated by George Shillibeer.


In New York, omnibus service began in the same year, when Abraham Brower, an entrepreneur who had organized volunteer fire companies, established a route along Broadway starting at Bowling Green. Other American cities soon followed suit: Philadelphia in 1831, Boston in 1835 and Baltimore in 1844. In most cases, the city governments granted a private company—generally a small stableman already in the livery or freight-hauling business—an exclusive franchise to operate public coaches along a specified route. In return, the company agreed to maintain certain minimum levels of service—though one of these standards was not upholstery. The New York omnibus quickly moved into the urban consciousness. In 1831, New Yorker Washington Irving remarked of Britain's Reform Act (finally passed in 1832): "The great reform omnibus moves but slowly."

The omnibus had many repercussions for society, particularly in that it encouraged urbanization. Socially, the omnibus put city-dwellers, even if for only half an hour, into previously-unheard-of physical intimacy with strangers, squeezing them together knee-to-knee (illustration, left). Only the very poor remained excluded. A new division in urban society now came to the fore, dividing those who kept carriages from those who did not. The idea of the "carriage trade", the folk who never set foot in the streets, who had goods brought out from the shops for their appraisal, has its origins in the omnibus crush.

The omnibus also extended the reach of the North Atlantic post-Georgian, post-Federal city. The walk from the former village of Paddington to the business heart of London in the "City" was a brisk one for a young man in good condition. The omnibus offered the nearer suburbs more access to the inner city.

More intense urbanization was to follow. Within a very few years, the New York omnibus had a rival in the streetcar: the first streetcar ran along The Bowery, which offered the excellent improvement in amenity of riding on smooth iron rails rather than clattering over granite setts, called "Belgian blocks". The new streetcars were financed by John Mason, a wealthy banker, and built by an Irish contractor, John Stephenson. The streetcars would become even more centrally important than the omnibus in the future of urbanization.


When motorized transport proved successful after c. 1905, a motorized omnibus was for a time sometimes called an autobus.

Buses began to replace streetcars in the U.S. because of a continuing series of technical improvements: pneumatic "balloon" tires during the early 1920s, monocoque body construction in 1931, automatic transmission in 1936, the diesel-engine bus in 1936, the first acceptable 50+ passenger bus in 1948, and the first buses with air suspension in 1953.

Bus services were a focal point in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. In the period after the American Civil War ended in 1865, racial segregation in public accommodations, including public transport such as rail and bus services, was enforced through Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. These were made to prevent African-Americans from doing things that a white person could do. For instance, Jim Crow laws required bus drivers to enforce separate seating sections. These laws and enforcement varied among communities and states. In 1955, after a long day of work, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus, bringing attention to the injustice of differential and degrading treatment based solely upon race. This incident, boycotts of bus services, other protests, and court challenges led a U.S. Supreme Court ruling banning segregation on public buses and helped lead the U.S. Congress to the pass the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act which clarified the unconstitutionality of public racial segregation laws.

In some areas of the United States, a forced busing system has been used to achieve racial desegregation of public schools. Under such a busing plan, children do not necessarily go to the nearest school geographically, but to such a public school in the same district where there is an appropriate mix of racial diversity.