Zohran's Free Buses are Possible — Just Ask This French City

A French city that made its bus system free offers valuable lessons for New York City and other U.S. cities that want to transition to fare-free transit.

Dunkirk went fare-free in 2018, making it the largest city in France to do so, after four years of planning and soft launches, explains Peter Yeung in Reasons to be Cheerful. 

Dunkirk focused on gradually improving the cleanliness, safety, and reliability of its buses. “You can’t just make buses free from one day to the next,” says Dunkirk deputy mayor Jean-François Montagne. “If the service is underused, timetables not well understood, if buses are always late, and you don’t change people’s views of public transit, then it won’t work.” 

Today, its fleet of 150 buses is “100% free, 7 days a week” on 18 routes, serving Dunkirk’s 200,000 residents. “A 2019 study by the Observatory of Free Transport Cities, an independent body, found that the policy has led to residents making more trips to the city center, that about half of the new bus riders were taking bus journeys they previously made by car, and that the attractiveness and image of the city has improved.”

There are questions about whether free transit makes sense at a larger scale. A 2025 French report found that free transit in smaller cities yields more new riders at relatively little cost, while free transit in big cities creates a much higher financial burden for the system or city. 

For Montagne, the 17 million euros that it costs to run the free buses (out of a city budget of 500 million euros) is “an important social investment” that “serves the population, it helps workers, but also families, for leisure, to attend healthcare.”