Earlier in December 2025, I took a short trip to Orangeville, Ontario, to take a ride on the province’s only fare-free transit system. Though Orangeville Transit provides a vital service for the town’s residents, the fare-free service is not necessarily a model for larger transit systems.
The town of Orangeville, population approximately 30,000, is on the outer edge of the Greater Toronto & Hamilton Area. Until 2021, it was connected to the Canadian Pacific mainline at Streetsville by a municipally-owned railway; Highways 9 and 10 link the town with Highways 400 and 410. GO Transit runs a limited weekday bus service from Brampton, and the remnant of Grey County’s GTR system runs between Orangeville, Shelburne, and Dundalk.
These three services meet at a curbside stop on Hansen Boulevard at First Street adjacent to the Orangeville Mall on the north side of town, where there is a standard bus shelter. After getting off the GO bus here, a GTR van arrived a few minutes later, dropping off a few more passengers. A few minutes after that, a yellow school bus arrived, sporting an Orangeville Transit sticker on the side. This would be my bus.
Though Orangeville has a fleet of four 30-foot buses, there have been reliability issues with those vehicles. First Transit, the contracted operator, uses its school buses to substitute for those.
After a winding route through several residential subdivisions, circling back on Hansen Boulevard, the bus arrived at the central transfer point located in a field west of the downtown core. The transfer point, located behind a small shopping plaza, is adjacent to the abandoned Orangeville-Brampton Railway corridor. However, the new terminal is not served by GO or GTR. GO Transit buses layover at the old Canadian Pacific Railway station site on Townline before heading south to Brampton GO Station.
In some ways, the fare-free service in Orangeville is a success. Ridership more than doubled between 2019 and 2023, the year it introduced free fares. The program has since been extended through 2026. However, Orangeville Transit is a very small operation, with only two routes, each on a 45-minute schedule. The two routes are made up of circuitous, one-way loops that provide service to the entire municipality, but do not provide through or speedy service.
Though large systems, like GO Transit and the Toronto Transit Commission, get more than half their funding from fare revenue (in the late 1990s, fares made up 80% of the operating costs for those two systems due to provincial austerity), smaller systems, with lower costs, can get by with free fares. This is also true of some mid-sized American systems, such as Richmond, Albuquerque, or Kansas City, where fare collection might be more trouble than it is worth. But there’s a trade off; for many riders, a more frequent and faster ride would be worth a few dollars — reliable government funding along with targeted reduced fare programs might be a better solution.
In Orangeville’s case, the rider gets what they pay for — a slow, infrequent, and circuitous service where you might end up picked up by a school bus.
Transit journeys, wrapped
Orangeville Transit was the last of 32 distinct transit services I got to ride in 2025 and was one of 10 systems I rode for the first time (another three of those were in Italy). Unfortunately, my first ride on Deseronto Transit was also my last. With the obvious exception of the Vatican, I have been on at least one transit service in every one of the 21 countries I’ve been to so far.
Local and regional transit systems taken in 2025:
Toronto Transit Commission
GO Transit
Brampton Transit
MiWay
York Region Transit
Durham Region Transit
Burlington Transit
Hamilton Street Railway
Orangeville Transit (1st time)
Simcoe County Linx
Barrie Transit
Wasaga Beach Transit (1st time)
London Transit
Deseronto Transit (RIP)
Belleville Transit
Kingston Transit
Brockville Transit (1st time)
River Route (1st time)
Transit Windsor
LTW Transit (1st time)
Thunder Bay Transit (1st time)
OC Transpo
Société de transport de l’Outaouais (Gatineau QC)
Société de transport de Montréal
Winnipeg Transit
Calgary Transit
TransLink (Metro Vancouver)
BC Transit (Greater Victoria)
Azienda Napoletana Mobilità (Naples) (1st time)
Azienda per la mobilità di Roma Capitale (1st time)
Ente Autonomo Volturno (Campagna IT) (1st time)
Sean Marshall 