If Chicago is a guide, the forever cash-strapped MBTA may be sitting on a rich vein of untapped revenue—area college students.
The Chicago Transit Authority’s U-Pass is mandatory for the nearly 140,000 full-time students at the 45 participating colleges and universities in the metro area, bringing in $20 million to the authority last year.
By contrast, the MBTA’s semester pass program is voluntary. Only up to 20,000 of the roughly 383,000 undergraduate and graduate students in the Boston metro area buy passes, with as much as $5 million a year going to the T.
Richard Rodriguez, president of the Chicago Transit Authority, says signing up college students boosts ridership, revenues, and helps the environment. But, even more importantly, the U-Pass program teaches them the advantages of using public transit, he says.
“If we can really get students while they are still students, when they go out into the workforce, they would have already gone through this learning curve of using mass transit,” Rodriguez says.
The CTA charges the schools 81 cents per student per day for the pass, which provides unlimited rides on buses and subways in the Windy City and 40 surrounding communities served by the system. The schools pass the charge along to their students through fees or as part of tuition, depending on how each school administers the program. For example, a Northwestern University graduate school student paid $74 for a three-month U-Pass last fall as part of a $78 activity fee. That’s a steep discount off the regular CTA unlimited-ride pass, which costs $86 a month.
The almost decade-old MBTA program offers an 11 percent discount on a variety of bus, subway, and commuter rail options. A four-month unlimited bus and subway pass costs a student $210, a $26 savings. The MBTA delivers the passes to the 53 area colleges and universities, which actually run the program.
Jacky Grimshaw, a Chicago Transit Board member who helped spearhead the first U-Pass pilot program more than 10 years ago, says back then there was immediate interest from students, faculty, and administrators at the city’s major schools like DePaul University. A dozen schools signed up for the program in the fall of 1998.
The authority pulled out all the stops to promote the benefits, trumpeting the deep discounts, the environmental gains, the ability to get out and see the city, and even the prospect of less competition between faculty and students for on-campus parking spaces. As awareness of the program spread, other schools, like the community colleges, wanted in. “It wasn’t a hard sell at all,” says Grimshaw. “It was just the opposite.”
“You need to talk to the students,” she adds, calling the U-Pass an “HMO for transit.” You don’t need to use it all the time, she adds, but if your bike gets a flat, you have it.
A transit system has to start small by getting one or two schools interested in a year-long pilot program, weighing the pros and cons, and getting the bugs out, suggests Rodriguez. “We weren’t able to convince all 45 to do it at once,” he says. “By word of mouth, it begins to sell itself.”
But MBTA officials don’t think a U-Pass-style program would fly here, according to Joe Kelley, the deputy general manager for system-wide modernization. He believes a mandatory pass wouldn’t be attractive to the many students living on campus in a city like Boston, where many people get around by biking and walking. Most of the students who use the MBTA pass program are commuters, Kelley says.
While the MBTA could certainly use the additional revenue, Kelley considers the Chicago program “not flexible.” He doubts that Boston-area colleges and universities would want to formally contract with the MBTA for a program that requires every full-time student at a university to buy a pass. “I would think they would opt out,” Kelley says of the schools.
Boston University spokesman Colin Riley is also skeptical about a mandatory pass program. About 14 percent of full-time BU undergraduates, about 2,350 students, used the semester pass last fall. Riley says that the number of students using passes has actually declined over the past three years, especially since the introduction of the Charlie Card. Students use Charlie Cards like a debit card, taking a “pay-as-you-go” approach and only buying the fares that they need. “I wouldn’t imagine that anyone would want to increase the cost to students attending college and university in Boston with an additional mandatory fee, since there are so many other options,” says Riley.
But Ben Timmins, a Boston University senior and MassINC intern who lives on campus during the academic year, says he likes the U-Pass concept. Initially, parents and students would be wary of additional fees, he says. But Timmins, who has used the MBTA semester pass on and off during his BU years, admits that he sees more of what the city has to offer with it than without it. “It’s only a matter of time before you start to see the positive consequences of those transit pass fees,” he says.
