Why I Joined the Get On the Bus Movement

Hello, my name is James Beyer and I’m excited to say that I’m the newest intern supporting Small Change Fund’s Get on the Bus movement. I am currently a second-year student in the marketing program at St. Lawrence College. During the fall semester, I was invited to attend talks from local organizations that were looking to take on placement students for the following semester. One of these speakers was Dan Hendry, a co-founder of Get on the Bus. My placement provides me with hands-on experience and is mutually beneficial, providing Get on the Bus with some extra help from a marketing student and giving me the opportunity to learn from their experienced staff.

I was immediately struck with excitement about the prospect of working with Get on the Bus as I have a personal connection with the movement and the work that Dan has done. I began my transit journey in Kingston before I even started high school. My primary residence was my father’s house but I spent half of my time at my mother’s house, across the city from my school and out of range of school bus routes. My older sister began to take me to school via public transit, and I quickly learned how to get around the city. Our mother paid for our transit passes until I started grade nine, at which point I was given a free pass. I wasn’t aware that my grade was one of the first years to receive free transit, or that Kingston was the first city in the country to do so.

I began high school at Kingston Collegiate Vocational Institute in 2014, two years after the initial implementation of free transit passes and training for high schoolers. I cannot emphasize enough how beneficial it was to the development of myself and my classmates. These passes and the training on how to utilize them effectively were essential to the way we travelled and allowed us to express our freedom. Whether it was movie dates, scenic walks, or showing up to our first job interviews, we took full advantage of our free transit passes. These experiences helped us grow and learn, experiencing all the diversity that the city had to offer when we left our neighbourhoods. I would never have had access to these experiences had I not been given the opportunity to freely travel outside of my neighbourhood. This is why I believe that youth everywhere should be given the opportunity that is free transit. 

For decades, getting your license at sixteen has been seen as the point at which a North American youth has earned their freedom. This concept is flawed, fueled by a classist assumption that everyone has the means to acquire their license and have access to a vehicle. The equity that is offered to youth by giving everyone the option to travel for free in their city is invaluable. When I spoke with Dan, I discovered that my free bus pass was not an old, established custom that youth across the country have always been welcome to. I found out that I was one of the first years to be given free transit in one of the first Canadian cities to implement this program. This was shocking to me, given that it just seemed to make sense to give youth this freedom and mobility.

Since then, a youth transit movement has spread across the country, and I am thrilled to have been given the opportunity to be part of it. You can expect more blog posts from me for the Get on the Bus movement in the coming weeks, or you can read past blog posts here.