New Year’s Eve Transit – How does St. John’s stack up?

Hitting the town on New Year’s eve? You’ll need to plan your transportation carefully. Cabs are tricky to find, and Metrobus goes off the road at 6 PM, staying closed all through New Years Day.

We were curious how other cities similar in size to St. John’s handle transportation on New Year’s Eve, so we had a look at mid-sized cities across Canada, some bigger, some smaller than St. John’s – and it turns out that we’re in a pretty small minority within that group.

In 13 of the 23 cities we looked at (including Halifax and Fredricton), public transit on New Year’s Eve is free, usually after 6 or 7 PM, and runs extra late to get people home after their festivities. In a number of cases, this is funded through private sponsorships ( Guelph, for example, has their free transit funded by a local brewery)

In another 7 of the cities we looked at (Including Saint John and Thunder Bay), transit runs on its regular Saturday schedule on NYE.

We could only find 3 cities that have no service at all on New Year’s Eve – Charlottetown, Trois-Rivieres, and our own St. John’s. The chart below shows what we found – note that this is the result of a quick set of searches, so we likely missed a few.