Bus Fare for College Students

Muni stop at 19th and Holloway, SFSU

         Tuition, books, housing, food, and countless other things cause college students to watch their budget, and bus fare should not be added to the load. San Francisco State University is said to be a “commuter-friendly” school with about 90 percent of the students who commute. It cost commuters as much as $2,400 per semester.

            Many other campuses in the Bay Area have already adopted the free bus passes. For example, the University of California, Berkeley added a$68 cost to tuition for free bus rides; a sticker is placed on a student’s ID card, and the card’s value is about $1,200. The University of San Francisco also added an extra $115 to tuition per semester for students to ride the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Clipper card scanner may sometimes be inefficient

            Scanning student ID cards while getting onto public transportation will also decrease fare evasion. In New York, fare evasion is one of the top crimes, and rose 69 percent between the years 2008 to 2013. The city of San Francisco spent over $9.5 million on fare enforcement, and only got back one million from enforcing fines.

            With bus passes already installed in student ID cards, students would not have to take the risk of not paying for a bus ride. The fare evasion fines are about two hundred dollars, which is too pricy for college students to pay off. Clipper cards also have shown previous failure to keeptrack of payment; frequent commuters have noticed that they got fined for fare evasion even though they paid.

            Having free bus passes will decrease the amount of cars on campus. Global warming is now a serious issue, and SFSU’s goal is to reduce commute related emission of carbon by an additional 5% by the year 2020. Reduction of cars will reduce the release of carbon into the air. Taking the bus will also benefit drivers because parking at SFSU is six dollars for all day parking, and if students do not pay there is a fine of $64.

            A survey issued in 2013 on the campus of SFSU about adding a fee to tuition for free or discounted transportation, showed that 58 out of 72 students were for the notion. Despite the results from the survey, the student government has voted the service down twice. This is a debated topic because a fair amount of students who do not use the bus, do not want to pay extra for free or discounted transportation. Although free or discounted bus fare does not seem like a benefit to those who do not use public transportation, it actually is beneficial. Parking in San Francisco is inconvenient and if a student lives on campus the bus is a great source of transportation to go site seeing. There are also lots of resources and services on campus that we students do not take advantage of, which include the health center and the children’s center. These resources and services are included into our tuition.  

            Free or discounted Muni for SFSU students will only be the first step. BART and other forms of transportation should also slowly offer free or discounted passes. We, students of SFSU, need to push for free or discounted bus passes.