Free transit actually is a thing, and you might be surprised where
While public transit in many Canadian cities struggles with fares going up and ridership going down, in one community the passenger count has more than doubled in the past two years.
Transit ridership in the town of Orangeville, Ont., will, by the end of the year, have increased by 150 to 160 per cent, according to Mayor Lisa Post.
“It’s really impacting the entire community positively,” she said.
The reason for that big spike? Orangeville’s buses became free in 2023 as part of a test program which the town just pledged to continue until 2027.
The experiment is sparking discussion about whether some form of free transit is possible in bigger cities and how it might work.
Ridership has doubled since Orangeville, Ont., started a fare-free pilot project, but experts caution the concept would be an uphill climb in bigger communities that need the money transit brings in.
The community of 30,000 people, some 60 kilometres northwest of Toronto, may not be known for trendsetting, but has joined a list of communities in Canada and the U.S. where riding buses and streetcars is free.
And Post says more than two dozen officials from elsewhere in Canada have asked her about her city’s test — “municipalities of all sizes, from small rural to small urban like we are, right to big cities.”
How it adds up
Free transit is seen by advocates as a social equity policy that helps people with lower incomes.
And, when priced right, reliable transit can also reduce traffic and pollution.
Orangeville isn’t the first city in Canada to offer free transit for everyone, but it is the largest. Canmore, Alta., (pop. 17,036) went fare-free in 2022, after a few years testing it out in the summer.
Orangeville is twice the size of Canmore and, before going fare-free, about 100,000 riders a year used the three routes of its bus system.
In 2023, the year free transit began, it had 225,000 riders and it’s on track for more than 260,000 this year.
The budget for Orangeville transit is almost $1.2 million a year and in 2019, the last year for which data is available, fare revenue accounted for about $150,000.
Since collecting fares cost up to $80,000 a year, Orangeville decided it made sense to cover that small portion of the transit budget another way.
“We always are trying to find ways to improve our road networks for vehicles,” said Post. “We invest in car culture, we need to invest in transit culture.”
What riders say
Post says researching free transit included speaking with local food bank users who said not having to pay fares made “the difference of being able to…
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