Closing The Gap for Students in Waterloo Region’s Fare Structure
How can we solve it?
Written by: Noah Dykstra
September 20, 2026
There’s an invisible cost beyond the fare box that’s been charged to everyone living in Waterloo Region: it’s the cost of GRT and the Region of Waterloo doing nothing to make transit affordable for students.
Every day, thousands of high school students across Waterloo Region commute via public transport. Whether it be to school, to work or for any other reason, all young people in Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge experience the same issue: Waterloo Region’s Grand River Transit (GRT) charges high school students the same fare as adult riders. Unlike many other Canadian transit systems, GRT does not currently offer any discounted fare for youth aged 13 to 18.
In this article, we’ll break down why GRT has no dedicated pass for high school students, what the current transportation options for students in Waterloo Region are, and how the Region could learn from and implement fare structuring from other cities across Canada.
Funding structure for student transportation in Waterloo Region
First of all, the Province of Ontario provides student transportation funding to school boards for student transportation services for students in K-12. In Waterloo Region, this amounts to roughly $ 361 per student per school year. If we look at how this is broken down, roughly 75% of this funding is allocated to privately operated yellow school buses.
Only around 11% percent of high school students in Waterloo Region use a yellow school bus. The remaining 89% of students receive no benefit from this funding stream, despite it representing almost all of the region’s provincial student transportation allocation. This funding is also administered through private bus operators, of which the Region of Waterloo has no direct operational control over.
Eligibility for the yellow bus service is also determined by the Ministry of Education’s distance-based guidelines. High school students can qualify only if they live 3.2 kilometres or more from their designated school. A student living, for example, 2.5 kilometres away does not meet this threshold, and thus must choose to potentially pay up to $1040 per school year to take GRT instead.
So if all provincial funding for student transportation goes to an expensive service that only a fraction of students use, why doesn’t GRT or the Region of Waterloo offer an affordable alternative to yellow buses?
How We Got Here
GRT used to distribute physical booklets of reduced fares specifically to high school students, through the Waterloo Region District School Board and the Waterloo Catholic District School Board.
This program was funded entirely by Grand River Transit. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, which ended in July 2021, its funding was redirected into the existing Affordable Transit Program, which was built to expand transit access for low-income individuals and families more broadly.
The Affordable Transit Program serves a real need, but it does not cover most high school students. Eligibility requires either being 18 or older or applying as part of a low-income household. Most students meet neither condition: nearly all high school students are under 18, and even where a student has very little or no personal income of their own, eligibility is assessed at the household level rather than the individual level.
As a result, for the last several years, most high school students in this region have paid the same fare as any other adult rider, with no youth-specific discount available to them. This is not a small portion of students, but the entire population of students in Grades 9–12 who previously had access to a reduced fare and currently do not.
Current proposal
MTSO’s position is that the youth fare for ages 13 to 18 should be reinstated, alongside a new discounted monthly or annual pass product for high school students, given that a per-ride discount alone does not address the needs of students riding on a regular schedule for school and part-time employment.
MTSO has engaged directly with student trustees from the Waterloo Region District School Board, and has proposed that any program design incorporate direct input from students and families who rely on GRT, following the model used in Kingston’s transit training rollout (covered in the next section) rather than a top-down implementation.
The decision-making bodies relevant to this change include the Region of Waterloo, GRT, and the affected school boards.
Comparable programs in other municipalities
Several municipalities across Canada and North America currently operate similar youth transit fare programs to what we propose, but the data is most telling from cities who went and implemented fully free transit for high school students.
Kingston, Ontario, issues annual bus passes to students in grades 9 through 12, paired with transit training sessions delivered to incoming Grade 9 students in partnership with local schools. Since the program’s introduction in 2012, overall transit ridership in Kingston has grown by 73 percent, and ridership among grades 9 and 10 students specifically grew by 176 percent to over 63,000 trips in a single year. High school ridership overall increased from roughly 28,000 to close to 600,000 trips annually.
Burlington introduced free transit for youth aged 13 to 19 during evenings after 6 p.m. and on weekends in August 2023. Youth ridership during those specific hours increased by 50 percent following the change. Based on that result, the city expanded the program into a full-day, fare-free summer pilot for youth in July and August 2025.
In Sacramento, California, the regional transit agency provides a relevant data point on ridership impact. Following the introduction of a fare-free program for K through 12 students in 2019, student ridership increased 106 percent within the first year, and 127 percent by early 2020. Student trips now account for approximately 25 percent of total transit ridership in Sacramento.
Revenue considerations
A reinstated youth fare would reduce per-ride revenue from student riders. However, several factors offset this. First, GRT’s own historical ridership data suggests that a discounted fare increases ridership among previously price-excluded riders, which offsets some of the reduction in per-trip revenue. GRT’s 2026 budget implemented service reductions on Routes 9, 13, 19, and 30, all routes with a largely high school student ridership base, attributed in part to falling overall ridership, including declining international student numbers.
Second, another option for funding is provincial subsidization.
We mentioned before how the province willingly pays for privately run yellow school buses in Waterloo Region. But what if instead of most of their funding going to buses that most students don’t use, a portion of it went toward subsidized GRT fares? If GRT itself can subsidize fares for over 75,000 university and college students in Waterloo Region, it’s a reasonable assumption that some provincial funding could be used to at least meaningfully subsidize a high school student’s fare, and bring it a lot closer to what fares are like for youth in other communities.
Conclusion
When high school students are forced to pay full adult fares, their ability to reach jobs, extracurriculars, and educational opportunities is restricted by what their families can afford or where a yellow bus happens to go. Giving youth access to affordable transit builds early confidence and independence across the GRT network, while delivering economic returns to the region.
The cities covered in this article prove that affordable youth transit isn’t impossible nor unaffordable. Kingston, Burlington, and Sacramento have already shown that lowering fare barriers benefits both riders and transit agencies. All Waterloo Region needs now is the political will to catch up.
More Transit Southern Ontario’s position is straightforward: reinstate a dedicated youth fare for ages 13 to 18, introduce a discounted monthly or annual pass, and design the program alongside the students and families who will actually use it.
Every year this goes unaddressed, thousands of high schoolers are treated as full adults, while the lifelong transit ridership that could sustain and grow Waterloo’s transit system slips away.
We’re all paying for this, just in a way that’s showing up everywhere except the fare box.
