Free Buses In Worcester Area May Return As WRTA Builds Next Budget

WORCESTER, MA — The Worcester Regional Transit Authority may continue the transit agency's fare-free policy in the next fiscal year — welcome news for the 70 percent of local residents who support continuing the policy, according to a new poll.

The WRTA advisory board on March 21 voted to direct the agency's administrators to produce a fiscal year 2025 budget that includes another year of fare-free buses. That's a similar process to what happened in 2023, when the advisory board included $3.6 million in the fiscal 2024 budget to retain the policy through June 30. Fiscal year 2025 runs July 1 to June 30, 2025.

WRTA buses went fare-free in March 2020, partially as a way to prevent contact between bus drivers and passengers in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But eliminating fares for WRTA buses was being discussed before the pandemic after a Worcester Regional Research Bureau report showing the benefits. The WRTA board has voted multiple times since 2020 to keep the policy in place. The agency has relied on federal stimulus funds to pay for fare-free, and WRTA had about $20 million in stimulus funds during deliberations in 2023.

Next week's budget talks will dovetail with a recent MassINC poll commissioned by the Worcester Zero Fare Coalition that found 70 percent of residents in the WRTA service area either strongly or somewhat support keeping fare-free around for a fifth year.

The poll, funded by a grant from the Barr Foundation, also found that 19 percent of riders would stop riding completely if fares returned, while 26 percent said they would ride the bus less often with fares in place. The poll was conducted in late February and early March and included 500 residents from WRTA's fixed-route service area.

WRTA's fare-free policy has also coincided with the system seeing the best recovery of the large bus systems in Massachusetts since the pandemic. At the end of 2022, annual ridership topped 3.06 million trips, according to a WRRB report, higher than 2019 — although lower from the system's high point in 2016 at 4.04 million trips. Ridership dipped to a low of 2.19 million trips in 2021.

But no other peer bus systems in the state had recovered above pre-pandemic levels, according to the report.

"WRTA has had an unparalleled recovery in the region. It is not only the unique agency in the analysis that reached and surpassed its pre-pandemic values (which it achieved for the first time in November 2021), but it has continued to grow, closing December 2022 with 149.1% of its 2019 unlinked passenger trips," the report said.

WRTA isn't the only bus system in Massachusetts that's free to ride. The Merrimack Valley Regional Transit Authority is free, and the MBTA's routes 23, 28, and 29 will be free through February 2026. Routes 23 and 28 have recovered to near or above pre-pandemic ridership, according to the MBTA.

The WRTA board's Audit and Finance Committee will meet to review the fiscal 2025 budget on April 4, with the full budget presented to the board on April 21.