Today, Labour Day, Monday, September 5, the Town of Oakville marks a significant milestone with the commemoration of Oakville Transit’s 50th anniversary.

After the Town commissioned an external study, with the approval of Council, the Town officially established Oakville Transit September 5, 1972. It introduced service with 31 drivers, 10 new buses and five routes across town with a 20-minute schedule frequency to more than 300 bus stops.

Oakville Transit first focused on a downtown terminal at Church and Dunn Streets, then moved to emphasize service to the Oakville GO Station. While Oakville Transit initially operated solely within the Town of Oakville, it expanded to serve neighbouring municipalities expanded over the decades.

Today, Oakville Transit serves four GO Stations, two GO bus terminals and makes connections to Burlington and Mississauga with eight bus routes. Oakville Transit’s current fleet includes 101 conventional buses and 23 specialized transit buses, 22 local routes and eight school specials, with 1,137 bus stops. Oakville Transit had more than 4 million boardings in 2019.

Oakville Transit’s 220 employees, including 150 bus operators, operate out of a state-of-the-art transit facility on Wyecroft Road.

Other notable accomplishments and features of Oakville Transit include:

• Oakville Transit’s launched door-to-door transportation service, care-A-van (specialized transit), for persons with disabilities in 1980/
• It opened the the Uptown Core Terminal in 2008 and an on-campus bus loop at Sheridan College in 2009.
• It implemented six grid routes in 2009, a major change to transit service, allowing for more direct east-west and north-south travel along major cross-town streets. It also introduced all-day service to the Bronte GO station then. Today, five remaining grid routes still play an important part of Oakville Transit’s network.
• It introduced the PRESTO fare card in 2010, allowing passengers to travel with ease between Oakville and other transit agencies across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.
• It opened a modern, 265,000 square-foot Silver LEED-certified transit operations facility on Wyecroft Road in 2011,
• It launched Home to Hub — an on-request service — in 2015 for Oakville neighbourhoods north of Dundas Street, expanding it to Southeast Oakville in 2017.
• It introduced an intelligent transportation system and control centre, with pre-board announcements, on-board stop announcements (visual and auditory), and real-time bus tracking in 2016.
• It now has a fully accessible bus fleet, featuring low floor ramps on all buses and bike racks on all conventional buses
• It supplied free public Wi-Fi on all buses beginning in September 2022.
• It introduced battery electric buses in 2019 and it plans to acquire more than 60 replacement and expansion buses by 2026 and an all-electric fleet by 2035.