Vancouver city councillor calls for free rides on four TransLink bus routes | Daily Hive

A long line of passengers waiting for the No. 23 Main Street Station/English Bay bus at SkyTrain's Stadium-Chinatown Station on Dec. 5, 2025. (Kenneth Chan)

Vancouver city councillor Sean Orr of the COPE party has put forward a member motion calling on the municipal government to explore a one-year, fare-free pilot project on a small number of TransLink bus routes.

Several bus routes that operate within Vancouver are flagged by him as potential suitable candidates for a fare-free period, including No. 5 Robson/Downtown, No. 9 UBC/Boundary, No. 20 Victoria/Downtown, and No. 41 Crown/Joyce Station.

He says these four bus routes are “well-used, serve diverse communities (including many lower-income neighbourhoods), and are iconic parts of the transit network. These routes’ popularity and citywide significance make them strong candidates for a high-visibility fare-free transit pilot that could maximize public awareness and ridership impact.”

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If Vancouver City Council provides the motion with a green light next week, City staff would approach TransLink to potentially consider such a pilot project.

The motion also specifically requests that potential bus routes for such a pilot project be weighed on factors such as equity impacts, symbolic and popularity importance, available capacity to handle more passengers, congestion relief impacts from attracting more ridership, and the geographical balance of free public transit benefits. City staff would ask TransLink to offer cost estimates for each fare-free pilot project scenario, including lost fare revenue and any additional operating costs.

TransLink would be asked if it is interested in participating in a “cost-sharing arrangement” to support a pilot project, including contributing its operating revenue or other resources to the initiative.

As well, the motion asks the mayor to write a letter to the provincial government to enact a much more ambitious “temporary pilot program for fare-free transit routes across Vancouver and the Lower Mainland.”

If the motion is approved as written by Orr, without amendments during City Council’s deliberations, City staff would report back on their findings and recommendations in the second quarter of 2026.

According to Orr, a one-year, fare-free pilot project on five bus routes in New York City that ended in September 2024 saw a 30 per cent increase in ridership on weekdays and 38 per cent on weekends, led to a drop in assaults on bus drivers by 39 per cent, and saw 11 per cent of its new riders abandon their usual car or taxi trips. The largest increase in new riders during New York City’s pilot project was from individuals earning under $28,000.

Of course, all of this depends on TransLink’s interest, and any approach and decision would ultimately come from their duty and jurisdiction as the public transit authority for Metro Vancouver. It may even require regional consensus — the approval of the Mayors’ Council, such as through an Investment Plan.

However, this proposal comes against the backdrop of TransLink’s structural financial challenges, which were reiterated during the public transit authority’s board of directors meeting earlier this week. Partly due to financial reasons, the board also rejected calls from advocacy groups and some municipal officials to bring HandyDART in-house, with TransLink estimating it would increase the public transit authority’s operating costs by up to $70 million each year.

Since 2021, the expansion of free public transit for youth up to age 12 has been funded by the provincial government, which provides additional annual operating subsidies to both TransLink and BC Transit.

Under the Mayors’ Council’s 10-year directions, TransLink is focused on directing its operating budget resources toward broadening the bus network to reach underserved areas of Metro Vancouver — particularly in the suburban areas outside of the city of Vancouver — and increasing frequencies on busy bus routes facing growing overcrowding issues.

This past spring, the Mayors’ Council approved higher-than-usual increases to public transit fares, property taxes, and parking taxes to implement improved services to reduce overcrowding and help cover half of the structural revenue shortfall, with a final round of provincial operating subsidies through 2027 covering the remainder.

This motion feeds into a longstanding broader debate: Is the best way to increase public transit ridership to expand service and coverage — or to make public transit free?

The four suggested bus routes for a free pilot project are also among Metro Vancouver’s busiest bus routes for ridership.

According to TransLink’s 2024 statistics, the No. 5 (considered as a single route with No. 6 for data purposes) is the 11th busiest bus route out of nearly 200 bus routes in the entire region, with averages of nearly 12,700 boardings per weekday, 11,100 per Saturday, and 9,500 per Sunday/holiday. The No. 5/No. 6 combined created a looping route within the downtown Vancouver peninsula.

The No. 9 is TransLink’s 15th busiest bus route, with averages of over 12,000 boardings per weekday, 8,800 per Saturday, and 8,000 per Sunday/holiday, while the No. 20 is the 13th busiest bus route, with averages of 12,600 boardings per weekday, 10,100 per Saturday, and 8,800 per Sunday/holiday.

Frequencies on the No. 20 have been cut drastically compared to before the pandemic, with peak hour service running about half as frequently to enable the route’s resources to be redirected toward bus routes seeing much higher ridership growth earlier in the post-pandemic recovery phase.

The No. 41 is the 38th busiest bus route, with averages of roughly 5,700 boardings per weekday and Saturdays and 5,500 per Sunday/holiday.

There are some Canadian and American examples of free or fare-free public transit services, but these are generally on public transit networks with lower overall public transit ridership, unlike the high demand and growth experienced on the TransLink system.

In December 2022, Calgary Transit began a free-fare zone for the CTrain LRT and bus routes operating along the 7 Avenue corridor within downtown Calgary only. It enabled passengers to hop on and off the train within this free corridor zone in the city centre, as long as they board and exit within that zone.

Calgary Transit previously struck a five-year sponsorship deal with TD Bank to brand and help support this zone, naming it the “TD Free Fare Zone” in exchange for having the sponsorship revenue subsidize free fares. But in November 2025, it was announced that TD Bank ended the sponsorship early, which has put the long-term future of the free-fare zone in question due to the public transit authority’s financial challenges.

Public transit ridership in downtown Calgary, which has a much higher concentration of office uses than downtown Vancouver, has seen a steep dive over the past decade — initially due to Alberta’s recession from the collapse in oil prices, and then from the post-pandemic office market slump.

Overall, public transit ridership in downtown Vancouver continues to be below pre-pandemic volumes due to the adoption of semi-remote and hybrid office work, but not to the same extent as Calgary’s city centre.

TransLink is projecting slower public transit ridership growth in 2025 and 2026 due to changes in the federal government’s immigration, international student, and foreign worker intake policies, as well as sustained economic uncertainty.

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