Grand River Transit

[mpd618]

Now, this doesn't include the cost savings of NOT collecting fares, nor does it include additional capacity, so some route might be fairly busy.  In the above business plan, you can determine that GRT was delivering 550K hours of service for 20M passengers, or less than 40 passengers per service-hour.  If you assume an average ride of 30 minutes, that's only an average of 20 people on a bus: clearly there is capacity to carry more people on many routes.  Adding 20% capacity (should free transit become outrageously popular) would cost about $15M, or an additional $35/household.

Just like roads, transit infrastructure needs to handle demand on peak routes at peak times. There may well be lots of capacity on average due to coverage routes, but routes like the 7, 12, 201, etc. probably don't have it in their peak sections. I don't know whether it would require 20% or 100% more capacity. The best comparison is with the effect of the U-Pass on transit ridership. And I would assume that the biggest latent demand would be for transit to and from the downtowns, where free transit would compete quite nicely with paid parking.

It's within the realm of feasibility and a reasonable question to consider, I think.