Nassau's bus system has always been good at going east and west and bad at almost everything else, and starting Monday it is testing a fix in one specific place. The Mini MILE, a new pilot service from NICE, begins running September 21 between the Bellmore LIRR station and Hempstead Turnpike in East Meadow, stitching together a north-south corridor through Bellmore, North Bellmore, North Merrick and East Meadow that has never had its own bus. Through October 31, riding it costs nothing.

Half a bus route, half a ride service

The Mini MILE is a hybrid, and the hybrid part is what makes it worth explaining. It runs a fixed schedule along the corridor, with nine weekday departures from the Bellmore station, the first at 6:44 a.m. and the last at 6:19 p.m., and the run to Hempstead Turnpike takes about 40 minutes end to end. Overall service runs 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Friday.

But unlike a regular route, it also takes requests. Riders inside the service zone can book an on-demand pickup or drop-off through the NICE Mini app or by phone, and the small bus will come to them rather than making them walk to a stop on the line. Wait at a posted Mini MILE stop and it swings by on schedule; summon it from your block and it bends the route to get you. NICE has run on-demand Mini zones on the South Shore between Lynbrook and Merrick and up in the greater Syosset area for a while now, but this is the first one that welds the on-demand idea onto a fixed timetable.

What it costs and how to pay

The fare, once it exists, is $3 a trip with no surge pricing, payable with coins, OMNY, a credit card through the app or the GoMobile app, and the service accepts NICE transfers. Every vehicle is wheelchair accessible.

Until then it is simply free. NICE is waiving fares through October 31, a six-week open house that amounts to the agency paying residents to try the thing. Details and the app are at ridemini.com, and the full timetable is posted on the NICE site, effective September 13.

Why north-south is the hard direction

Look at a NICE map and the shape of the problem is obvious. The system's workhorse routes run east-west along the big corridors, Hempstead Turnpike and Jerusalem Avenue among them, because that is where the traffic and the density are. Getting from a South Shore LIRR station up to the turnpike, a distance of a few miles, has long meant a car, a ride share or a walk that nobody makes in January. NICE chief executive Jack Khzouz framed the new service as exactly that missing link: robust east-west service already exists on the big roads, and the Mini MILE is the way to connect communities to it running the other direction.

The corridor it picked is a sensible test case. At the south end sits the Bellmore LIRR station on the Babylon branch. At the north end is East Meadow's stretch of Hempstead Turnpike, one of the densest retail strips in the county. In between are schools, community centers and thousands of households in Bellmore, North Bellmore and North Merrick, many of them one-car families making two-car schedules work.

What to watch

This is a pilot, which means the honest answer to how long it lasts is that it depends on whether people ride it. The free period through Halloween is the measuring window, and the results will decide whether the Mini MILE stays, grows, or quietly joins the long list of transit experiments. Similar north-south connectors are the obvious next candidates if this one works, because Bellmore is hardly the only South Shore community whose train station and shopping corridor face away from each other.

For the next six weeks, though, the practical takeaway is simple. If you live in Bellmore, North Bellmore, North Merrick or East Meadow, there is a new bus that will come when you ask it to, it connects the train to the turnpike, and until November it does not cost a dime.