The young Virginia Stephen grew up riding the horse-drawn omnibuses that traversed central London until the First World War. About the time of her marriage to Leonard Woolf in 1912, the transition to motorized omnibuses was in full stride. From George Shillibeer's horse-drawn omnibuses in 1829 to the first licensed motor omnibuses in 1904 to the enclosed double-deckers of the 1930s, the omnibus was the principal middle class conveyance in central London. It vied with train, tram, and underground transport to provide passengers with an inexpensive and efficient alternative to cabs and later to automobiles. In her three London novels, Night and Day (1919), Mrs.Dalloway (1925) and The Years (1937), Woolf subtly marks the transition from horsedrawn omnibuses of the 1880s and ‘90s to motor omnibuses of the early twentieth century. It is in The Years, however, and especially in the deleted 1914 section of that novel that she embeds both a factual and cultural history of the London omnibus, a history that culminates with the Road Traffic Act of 1930 and the London Passenger Transport Act of 1933, the latter of which consolidated and regulated all of London's transport. This essay explores the largely unexamined role of the omnibus in Woolf's novels on several levels: as a realistic marker of technological progress, as a cultural commentary on the British class system, and as a vehicle for Woolf's narrative technique. A frequent rider of both horse and motor omnibuses, Woolf knew the colors, routes, and fares of the omnibuses that formed a web across London. She would have been familiar with the constant accounts in the Times and elsewhere about omnibus-related traffic congestion, accidents, fares, and strikes (especially the 1926 strike). It is therefore not surprising that she would have appropriated the omnibus as a constant symbol in her city novels. While a number of critics have investigated the ways in which new technologies influenced Woolf's writing (in particular, Gillian Beer, Kate Flint and Rishona Zimring), none have explored the means by which the common omnibus, a moving fixture in the lives of the Stephen children (chronicled in Woolf's early diaries), provided Woolf with a chance to map the changing face of London from the final decade of Queen Victoria's reign to the years between the World Wars.