Public transit rarely draws the attention that a new arena or bridge does, yet few municipal services shape daily life quite so directly, and in Canada nearly every city and most sizeable towns fund a bus or rail service of some kind. What carries the bulk of that daily load is a web of local routes, each running to a posted timetable through its own corner of the city. A neighbourhood bus will deliver you to the corner store or the medical clinic conveniently enough, but it was never engineered to span an entire metropolitan region; consequently, to traverse the city, or to connect with an intercity coach bound for somewhere considerably farther afield, a passenger must ultimately make their way to one designated central terminal. Responsibility for administering all of this varies considerably, resting with either the provincial or the municipal government: around Metropolitan Vancouver a single regional transportation authority integrates the local services, whereas elsewhere throughout British Columbia the responsibility devolves to individual municipal councils.

Where the population is dense, no single route can absorb the crush of riders heading in every direction at once, and stitching the city together one line at a time quickly breaks down. The usual answer in a large centre is an integrated network, arranged so that one fare and a transfer will carry a passenger from a quiet suburb clear across to the far side of the city without paying again. Systems of this sort fold dozens of separate routes into a single trip, so that a journey pieced together from three buses and a train still counts as one ride. Toronto, Calgary, and Halifax all run networks along these lines. A few of the boldest, Edmonton's among them, stretch well past the city's own boundaries to link in the towns nearby under one shared regional agreement.