Bus line 35 is getting a new final stop. The route is being extended to Radišani, to the terminus of line 57, giving the municipality of Butel a direct bus link to the municipality of Aerodrom - with no more calculating how many changes it takes and how much of your day that costs.

The procedure is complete, with the agreement reached between Butel mayor Darko Kostovski, Skopje mayor Orce Ǵorǵievski and the director of the city transport company JSP. According to the announcement, the new timetable will be presented in the coming days, and the trial line starts running within days after that.

"In the coming days we will present the new timetable, and within a few days a trial line will be launched running to the last stop of line 57 in Radišani," Kostovski said.

Trial means trial

For now the extension runs as a trial line. If residents show interest and the need is confirmed as real, the route stays. That phrasing means one thing: passenger numbers will decide. Who counts them, by what criteria and how long the test runs - none of that has been said.

Butel municipality thanked the City of Skopje and JSP for the cooperation, and also the residents whose proposals and suggestions prompted the solution. That last sentence is more precise than it looks. The line did not come from a transport study - it came from people writing in, again and again, that they had no way of getting from one end of the city to the other.

That is both the good news and the bad news. The good: when citizens ask for something specific, properly and repeatedly, it sometimes actually happens. The bad: a solution that had been needed for years waited on a petition from residents before it would move through the procedure.

What remains now is the most mundane part, and the most important - the timetable. A direct link between Butel and Aerodrom is worth exactly as much as the bus arriving on time, and as often as it arrives. If the interval is such that two changes get you there faster, the trial line will fail the test it set itself.