The Missing Piece to the Commuting Puzzle
City College, despite its name, is a commuter school. People are driving or taking public transportation from all across the Bay to get to class. This is no cheap feat as gas prices continue to skyrocket. A round trip on BART can range anywhere from $4.80 to $19, depending on where your station of
By Henry Crowell
Since 2016, San Francisco State University students have had the “Gator Pass” under their belt. This allows students unlimited rides on every public transit agency in the Bay Area as a part of their tuition fees. Why are City College students not afforded something similar?
City College, despite its name, is a commuter school. People are driving or taking public transportation from all across the Bay to get to class. This is no cheap feat as gas prices continue to skyrocket. A round trip on BART can range anywhere from $4.80 to $19, depending on where your station of origin is.
So why has City College not made an effort to implement a “Ram Pass?” I know many students, including myself, would take full advantage of the opportunity for free access to public transportation that we already use, and it would allow students who drive to save on gas money and carbon emissions.
As it turns out, they’ve tried. Extended Opportunity Programs and Services offers $400 Clipper Cards and $100 to eligible students. However, I learned that these specific Clipper Cards do not consider transfers, meaning you have to pay full price each time you tap your card. As you can imagine, these deplete quite quickly, leaving students who partake in this venture to dip into their own funds at a certain point.
Obviously, this pales in comparison to the Gator Pass’s unlimited rides on any and all transit across the Bay, and it’s made even worse by the fact that City College is largely a commuter college with no on-campus student housing available. Prospective students are left stuck between a rock and a hard place, forced to choose between the cost of driving and the cost of taking public transit.
A factor that may weary some about implementing a transit pass is the fee associated with it, as SFSU students currently shell out $130 a semester for access to the Gator Pass.
For some, the best option if they’re taking transit to class daily is to buy the monthly pass, and as of July 1, that will run you a cool $104 a month.
Accounting for the fact that the $130 being spent is stretched out over almost five months and gives the user unabated access to all the transit the Bay Area has to offer, it gives prospective students another reason to choose a competing two or four-year institution over City College.
