July 19, 2021 at 3:40pm Alexandria is getting ready to go fare-free this fall, and at the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission (NVTC) on July 1 the architects of that plan shared some of the challenges ahead. Josh Baker, general manager of DASH, said a fare-free bus system had been brought up before, but transit authorities started looking at an emergency pandemic-program as a way to test what the program could look like on a larger, more permanent scale. “We saw an opportunity in being fare-free as option in pandemic [as a way to] take a deeper look at what fare-free meant for our system and how that impacted our community,” Baker said. “Ultimately what it came down to for us: here’s an opportunity to do something that requires less admin burden, less intricacies, less details.”