Public transportation systems are a fundamental necessity in current times where sustainability and rising safety costs are important concerns to government officials and the general public. Therefore, the design of public transportation systems is an area of great interest for researchers and practitioners. Nonetheless, there is usually little analysis of network properties during transit design and planning. Moreover, due to the lack of empirical tools, there is not much consideration of transit safety at the planning stage . In this research, a study was performed to explore zonal based network properties applied to bus systems. A new technique to measure network connectivity was developed and applied to a real-world transit system, which in addition to the relationship between edges and vertices, incorporated the influence of transit operational factors (i.e. frequency of routes). Additionally, the effect of bus route transfers was analyzed and modeled by adding intermediate walking transfer links between bus stops. The calculated network properties were applied as explanatory variables in the development of macro-level ridership and collision prediction models. The proposed methodology was applied to the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) public transportation system and its 577 traffic analysis zones. The developed mathematical models include, seven multiple linear regression models which explain transit commuting ridership. The regression models revealed that ridership is positively linked to network characteristics such as coverage, connectivity, complexity and, the local index of transit availability (LITA). In addition, 35 collision prediction models were developed using a Generalized Linear Regression technique, assuming a Negative Binomial error structure. The safety models showed that increased collisions were associated with transit network properties such as: connectivity, coverage, overlapping degree and the LITA. As well, the models revealed a positive relation between collisions and transit physical and operational attributes such as number of routes, frequency of routes, bus density, length of bus route and 3+ priority lanes, among others.