Each day, hundreds of people commute from Maple Grove by bus to work. The direction is definite: Routes begin at the city's edges and make a few turns before aiming at downtown Minneapolis.

But since June, a lone bus has been going the wrong way.

Route 720 runs not out of Maple Grove, but into it. Each hour, a bus begins in Brooklyn Park, goes west along Elm Creek Boulevard and turns through retail complex after retail complex.

The route was largely born out of a conundrum business owners, county job developers and transit officials witnessed as Maple Grove's retail grew: New businesses had jobs they needed to fill, but many of those hoping to fill them didn't live in the city and didn't necessarily have cars.

"Until now, there was no service that could bring them here," said Mike Opatz, Maple Grove Transit's administrator. "The missing link was transportation."

The route has been around for only a few months, but already, its riders don't know what they'd do without it.

Paul Bushey relies on it to get from his Brooklyn Center home to Gander Mountain, where he's worked for 15 years. He used to drive, but when his wife died, he could no longer afford car insurance.

Ana Tafur, who lives in Columbia Heights, has been riding the bus to Best Buy in Maple Grove since her car broke down a few months ago. She uses Route 720 as the last leg of her morning commute.

Sherri Lund travels the route to find work. She has taken it to get to interviews in the Arbor Lakes area, where she hopes to work because the stores are "different -- more open and pretty" than in other retail centers.

The three riders know one another. One day last week, they were the only ones on the 9 a.m. trek. But there are others, they promised, like "that girl who works at Borders, a girl that works at Barnes and Noble and the kid who works at McDonald's," Tafur said.

Ridership has grown from an average of 30 one-way trips daily in June to 102 in September. That's not a lot for the number of bus runs -- 14 daily and 10 Sunday -- admitted Cindy Harper, senior transit planner for Metro Transit. "But we're looking for an upward trend, which is there."

Metro Transit and its parent organization, the Metropolitan Council, generally give a route 12 to 18 months to "reach maturity," she said. Opatz is hoping for 200-plus riders daily by the end of the route's first year next June.

More and more of those riders could be shoppers. In a recent, in-depth study of the northwest metro area and its transportation, Metro Transit found that a survey of riders, business owners and others ranked the Arbor Lakes area No. 2 in a list of most important destinations in the Twin Cities, second only to downtown Minneapolis.

"When we were speaking to our customers in the survey, they were interested in going there largely because they wanted to shop there," said Bob Gibbons, director of customer service for Metro Transit. "Then we learned about people wanting and needing to work there. So it's a nice blending of two potential markets."

Jobs without workers

Thus far, however, riders are generally getting to and from work.

Adam Johnson, a job developer for Hennepin County, lives in Monticello, and while riding a Maple Grove Transit bus to work at his Minneapolis office each morning, he began thinking about the retail he'd pass along the way.

He did a little research and found that, according to the state, Maple Grove has become the third-fastest growing job market in Hennepin County. And the city has nowhere near the unemployment rate to fill its newly created service positions.