LEWISTON – Greyhound bus service should be back downtown beginning in November, according to local transit officials.

Lewiston’s Oak Street bus station will be the new home for Greyhound subsidiary Vermont Transit, according to Marsha Bennett of the Lewiston-Auburn Transit Committee. The committee is scheduled to start building an office and ticket counter there next month, she said.

“It’s one of the little things that we can do, and maybe make things better for people in the community,” she said.

The Greyhound/Vermont Transit office in Lewiston runs 10 buses daily, seven days a week – five buses outbound for Portland, Boston and rest the country and five buses inbound from points south. Four of those continue north to Bangor, Augusta and Waterville.

Vermont Transit moved out of the Main Street bus depot in Oct. 1999 in favor of a Lisbon Street station near Interstate 95. The Main Street depot’s lack of parking was blamed for the move.

The city and the transit committee solved that problem in March when they opened the new Citylink bus terminal in the Park Street parking garage. The garage has ample parking for bus customers, Bennett said.

The attached bus terminal, which faces Oak Street, became the Lewiston hub for the rest of the Citylink bus system when it opened in March.

“We just started running a bus to Vermont Transit this spring,” Bennett said. “Even that was pretty limited. Someone catching the Greyhound might have to wait for a couple of hours, if they used the city bus system.”

Citylink runs a shuttle between Lewiston and Auburn every 15 minutes during peak hours. The Lewiston and Auburn hubs connect to every other route in the cities.

“If they don’t have a car, they can pretty much get anywhere in the city now, on their own,” Bennett said.