Montgomery County has made its local public transportation free to ride as of this week.

Starting Sunday, the county’s nearly 100 bus routes and its Flex service, which provides on-demand rides in the Rockville and Glenmont/Wheaton areas, cost nothing to ride.

Bus rides on the system used to cost $2 but became free during the COVID-19 pandemic and settled at $1 in 2022.

The change applies to each part of the county’s locally operated transit system, or LOTS, the county’s equivalent to Baltimore’s Charm City Circulator and Baltimore County’s Loop service. Free rides are now available on any RideOn, Flex or Flash bus but not Metro or bus routes operated by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, commonly called Metro or WMATA.

The change is about economic justice for lower-income riders who depend on public transit, County Councilman Evan Glass said. It’s also a practical choice. WMATA is upgrading fare boxes on its buses and requiring neighboring localities to do the same. The necessary upgrades would cost more than the anticipated county revenue from buses, Glass said.

“Making RideOn buses free helps us reduce traffic congestion, it cleans our air, and it builds a more sustainable and inclusive community for our residents,” said Glass, who chairs the County’s Transportation and Environment Committee.

Roughly two-thirds of the system’s riders earn less than $50,000 annually in a jurisdiction where the median household income is about $125,000, Glass said. He also highlighted that, despite the resumption of fares in 2022, the system continued to allow kids to ride free and it saw a 57% uptick in youth ridership.

“We have to meet residents where they are at, which is literally at the bus stop,” Glass said.

Across the U.S., it’s typical that fare box revenues do not come close to covering the costs of public transit, but the money certainly helps.

Those revenues used to account for as much as 20% of the Montgomery County system’s operating expenses, according to the federal National Transit Database, raking in as much as $22.5 million a year. Since going fare free in the pandemic — and allowing kids and seniors to continue to ride free after 2022 — the county has had to make up that difference from other sources.

The fare-free initiative is being paid for by the County’s Mass Transit Fund, which comes from property taxes, and state funds, according to Emily DeTitta, spokesperson for Montgomery County’s transportation department. She said the county expected to bring in $2 million to $3 million in coming years in fare box revenue, but the Metro-mandated upgrades would cost roughly $20 million.

“Transportation agencies never want to lose a revenue source, but it made the most sense when our leadership looked at the big picture,” DeTitta said.

The state government invests heavily in Montgomery County’s system, consistently covering about a quarter of operating expenses. In 2023, that meant a little over $43 million. Its state allocations have ruffled feathers in other Maryland localities — Baltimore County, for example — that also want to expand local transit networks but receive far less state money for them.

Ridership on the system fell by roughly half from fiscal years 2019-21 but nearly grew back to pre-pandemic levels in the fiscal year that just ended. The total is still being worked out, but officials estimate about 19.2 million riders in fiscal 2025, compared to 20.6 million in fiscal 2019.

The change also comes amid the county’s ambitious plans to expand its use of bus-rapid transit, which is a sort of souped-up bus service that typically uses dedicated lanes to separate buses from other traffic so they can move faster. The county has two such lines but has proposed a much larger network. Glass said the county is trying to identify funding sources.

Bus-rapid transit has largely been funded by federal and state grants, DeTitta said, along with general obligation bonds.

“We hope that will continue to be the case,” DeTitta said.