The Ontario Highway Transport Board has declared Quebec's biggest car-pooling company, Allo Stop, illegal.
The ban follows complaints from three long-distance bus companies.
Karima Carmali uses Allo Stop almost every week to visit her boyfriend in Montreal.
"Allo Stop is way cheaper," says Carmali. "To go to Montreal I pay $10 dollars for one ride."
That $10 includes $6 to cover the drivers' gas expenses, and $4 for Allo Stop for bringing the driver and passengers together.
By contrast, a round trip on the bus is over $50.
"I definitely won't be travelling as much," says Carmali. "And I feel it's just another way that people who can't afford a car, or choose not to have one, have less power in our society. So it creates more pressure on me to get a car and to pollute the environment, which I don't want to do."
Allo Stop has been forced to close because Ontario's three biggest bus companies, Greyhound, Voyageur and Trentway-Wagar, complained that it was competing with them.
Felix D'Mello of the Ontario Highway Transport Board agrees. He says because money is exchanged, it's a public transportation service, and that breaks the rules.
"If you are transporting passengers beyond a municipal boundary, and getting compensation for it, the only way you can provide that kind of service is with a public transportation license."
For now, Allo Stop's passengers will have few options but to buy tickets from the same three bus companies which launched the complaint.
Christa Peters is vice-president of the Carleton Students' Association. She says Allo Stop's closure is a blow to students, who already face rising debt and tuition costs.
"And now in one area where the students have fairly inexpensive travel, the Harris government says: 'absolutely not, we're going to take that away from you too'," says Peters.
But for Karima Carmali, Allo Stop's demise is as much an environmental issue as an economic one.
She says she can't understand why a government that professes to support car-pooling within Ontario's cities says it's a crime to car-pool between cities
