Transportation within and around very large population centres such as Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, involves the participation of multiple government entities including the metropolitan cities themselves, suburban municipalities, in addition to regional and provincial agencies. Most of these networks tend to be integrated into a single system with shared terminals, fare cards and other infrastructures to enable increased service frequencies for riders.
With the involvement of multiple transport partners, large cities are able to offer additional transit modes, including buses, coach buses, commuter rail, metros, light rail, and bus rapid transit lanes. While circulatory buses retain similar modes of fare payment such as exact change or transit cards, higher more complex modes tend to have unique payment systems such as tap-on-tap off, proof of payment schemes, and platform ticket machines.
Transit networks in large municipal areas are constantly shifting!
This is due to a wide variety of reasons, including construction, service changes, events, etc. Luckily, almost all large municipalities make use of a technology called GTFS to share bus locations, routes, changes, etc. electronically to various mapping vendors!
As such, the most effective way to navigate a large urban network is generally to use a trip planner application!