As of the New Year, no bus fare is needed to ride the Olympia area’s Intercity Transit. On Wednesday, the transit agency became the largest in the Pacific Northwest to eliminate fare collection, leapfrogging Corvallis and Missoula which did so earlier.
Intercity Transit leadership looked at the cost of replacing its obsolete fareboxes with new electronic fare card readers and decided it wasn’t worth it, especially given the potential to increase ridership and speed up boarding by not charging fares at all.