Bus Stop Emoji

🚏 is a bus stop sign. A little bus icon sits on top of a pole, standing at the edge of an imaginary road. The emoji was approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and came from the Japanese carrier sets, first drawn for SoftBank in 1999 and au KDDI in 2005. Most vendors render it with a blue sign and a white bus silhouette. A few early Apple and Facebook versions drew the sign as a red, white and blue disc that looked uncomfortably close to the Pepsi Globe, a coincidence Emojipedia flagged at the time.

In messages people use 🚏 two ways. The literal one is logistics: where to meet, where the bus picks up, the commute. The metaphorical one is waiting. Waiting for a person. Waiting for a reply. Waiting for something to start. The bus stop sign is the one emoji where the joke is that the bus hasn't arrived yet.

🚏 doesn't carry the lift of viral emojis. Meltwater's 2024 top-emoji report has it nowhere near the leaderboard, and its Google Trends baseline sits near zero for most of the 2020s, only creeping up in the last six quarters. When it shows up, it's usually factual: 'meet at 🚏' or '🚌 here soon 🚏'. The second most common use is the one the literal icon earns, which is patience. A crying emoji and a bus stop reads as 'still waiting.' A clock and a bus stop reads as 'any minute now, maybe.' It's one of the few transit emojis that feels equally at home in a TikTok caption and a group chat about the morning commute.

The bus stop sign came out of Japan's first-generation carrier emoji sets, the same ones that gave the world 🍣, 🎎, and 🚅. SoftBank included it in their 1999 release, and KDDI au followed in 2005. When Apple imported the Japanese set for Japanese iPhone users in iOS 2.2 (2008), 🚏 came along as an unlockable.

Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) standardized it under the name BUS STOP in the Transport and Map Symbols block, right next to ⛽ fuel pump and 🚥 horizontal traffic light. The original Apple design was a red-white-blue lollipop sign common on rural Japanese bus routes. Emojipedia pointed out that the disc looked like the Pepsi Globe, which may or may not be why Apple redesigned it for iOS 10.2 in early 2017.

The 2017 redesign swapped the Pepsi-esque disc for a square blue sign on a pole, the exact style of bus stops that dot the streets around Apple's Cupertino campus. The motorway emoji 🛣️ already pointed to Cupertino in its signage, and the new 🚏 quietly joined the club. Apple's emojis are stealth postcards from their own zip code.

1. 1999SoftBank ships original Japanese carrier emoji set including bus stop sign
2. 2005KDDI au releases its own bus stop emoji design (Type F)
3. 2008iOS 2.2 adds carrier emoji as unlockable on Japanese iPhones; bus stop included
4. 2010Unicode 6.0 standardizes as U+1F68F BUS STOP in Transport and Map Symbols
5. 2015Emoji 1.0 formally adds bus stop to the cross-platform keyboard
6. 2017Apple redesigns the emoji in iOS 10.2 to match Cupertino-area bus stop signage↗

• •Apple's current 🚏 design resembles local signage around Cupertino, where Apple is headquartered. The motorway emoji 🛣️ also shows Cupertino road signs.
• •The earlier Apple and Facebook designs looked so much like the Pepsi Globe that Emojipedia made a side-by-side comparison. Both swapped for a cleaner blue-sign design around 2017.
• •In Japanese bus-stop slang the lollipop signs are called 'bō' (棒, pole) and many still carry hand-painted route numbers — the emoji is a heavily simplified version.
• •The bus stop emoji was part of the 722 emoji approved in Unicode 6.0 on October 11, 2010, the single largest emoji release ever.
• •Google's Noto emoji gives the sign a white background with a pink 'BUS' label, which Emojipedia notes is atypical internationally and closer to a stylized pictogram than a real sign.
• •Google Trends shows 'bus stop emoji' searches jumped from a baseline of 0–5 in 2020–2023 to 54 in 2026-Q1, the highest point it's ever reached. Nobody quite knows why.
• •The bus stop emoji has no skin-tone or gender variants. It's one of the minority of human-adjacent emojis that didn't get diversified in the 2015–2016 expansion because there's no person in it.
• •Some earlier Android versions (4.4 KitKat) showed a green bus symbol instead of blue, leading to the same emoji rendering in two different colors depending on who you were texting.

• •The Simpsons, "Marge vs. the Monorail" (1993): the emoji descends from exactly this kind of folksy transit sign; the episode cemented the bus-stop-as-punchline template for American TV.
• •Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: the trolley and its stop were early TV coded-transit icons. 🚏 carries a bit of that gentle patience.
• •"Bus stop" as a chess opening trick name: a metaphor where the attacker 'waits' behind a piece like a commuter. Corners of chess Twitter use 🚏 playfully.
• •Japan's rural bus stops: the lollipop-on-a-pole design has its own photography subculture on Instagram tagged #バス停 (basutei). The emoji is the abstracted version of those weathered signs.