UCLA’s partnership with the Santa Monica Big Blue Bus to
provide BruinGo! has proved to be a great success for both the
university and the community.
Transit ridership for commuting to campus increased by 56
percent during BruinGo!’s first year and solo driving fell by
20 percent. BruinGo! has established itself as a popular
alternative to driving to campus.
BruinGo! produces two other important benefits: increased
financial aid for students and a fringe benefit for the staff.
Seventy-six percent of student BruinGo! riders receive financial
aid from the university and the money they save on bus fares can be
put toward books and other expenses. UCLA’s dollars get used
twice: first for transportation and second for student aid and
staff benefits.
BruinGo! is free to bus riders, but not to UCLA, which paid
$933,000 for 1.8 million Blue Bus rides last year. This is a
bargain when compared with other campus transportation programs.
For example, total fare payments for BruinGo! last year were
equivalent to the cost of 30 parking spaces in the new Intramural
Field Parking Structure, where each space costs $31,500.
BruinGo!’s cost is increasing, however, because more people
are using it. How can we pay for BruinGo! in the future?
Unfortunately, the UCLA Transportation Services has proposed two
very bad ideas. The first is to cancel BruinGo! on weekends and
holidays (which will save $107,000), and the second is to charge
BruinGo! users 25 cents for every ride as they board the bus (which
will raise $462,000).
Both proposals will make transit less desirable as an
alternative to solo driving. They will also reduce financial aid to
students at a time when fees are increasing and reduce benefits to
staff during a salary freeze.
Are there other ways for UCLA to find $569,000 for BruinGo!
without cutting service and charging fares? Here are several
suggestions:
Raise parking fines
Both the Graduate and Undergraduate Students Associations have
suggested a promising way to pay for BruinGo!: raise the fines for
parking violations on campus. UCLA earned $2.8 million from parking
citations last year and it uses the revenue to pay for alternative
transportation programs. Fines are paid by drivers who have broken
a law, but higher fines may reduce the number of violations because
it is intended to discourage violations in the first place. Drivers
who violate laws will end up paying for fares for bus riders who
are doing the right thing.
Use BruinGo! to improve the Campus Express
Besides providing BruinGo!, UCLA provides a much more expensive
transit service of its own ““ the Campus Express ““ for
rides around campus. The Campus Express costs $2.5 million for 1.2
million rides last year, or $2.05 per ride. UCLA’s cost for a
short shuttle trip across campus was about four times the cost of a
BruinGo! trip all the way from Venice to campus.
Other universities have merged their campus shuttles with the
local public transit systems to save money. UCLA now spends $2.5
million a year for the Campus Express, so saving only 25 percent of
its cost will be enough to avoid cutting BruinGo! and charging 25
cents per ride. One Blue Bus line and one Green Bus line to UCLA
already serve the Westwood Village to Ackerman route of the Campus
Express. Parkers in Lot 32 would have to walk one block to Westwood
Boulevard to catch BruinGo! to Ackerman Union, but they would gain
more frequent service that also runs longer hours.
BruinGo! already serves many on-campus trips. For example, a
round trip between Murphy Hall and UCLA’s office building on
Wilshire Boulevard takes seven minutes longer on the Campus Express
than on BruinGo! The time saved on BruinGo! probably helps explain
why its ridership increased 25 percent during the second year,
while ridership on the Campus Express fell 11 percent. Canceling
BruinGo! on weekends and charging 25 cents per ride may reverse
these ridership trends, but is this desirable? Charging for
BruinGo! and diverting trips to the Campus Express would,
perversely, slow down university business.
Other options
There are still other ways to find the additional $569,000 a
year needed to fund BruinGo!. An increase in parking permit fees of
$1.50 a month would raise about $500,000 a year. A student fee of
$5 a quarter would also raise about $500,000 a year. Or a permit
fee increase of 75 cents a month and a student fee of $2.50 a
quarter would together raise $500,000. Berkeley students recently
voted by an 88 percent majority for a fee of $68 a year to fund
their fare-free transit program (Class Pass), so UCLA students
might be willing to support a far smaller fee increase to avoid
cuts in BruinGo!
What are UCLA’s transportation
priorities?
Parking spaces in the new IM Parking Structure cost $31,500
each, and permits to park in it are only $54 a month, so a large
subsidy must come from somewhere. And a solo driver who parks on
campus and then rides the Campus Express to another destination and
back receives a further subsidy of $4.10 a day for the two shuttle
trips, while someone who rides the Blue Bus all the way to and from
campus, without parking, receives a subsidy of only $1.22 a
day.
Does this comparison suggest that shrinking BruinGo! and
charging 25 cents a ride for it are the best ways for UCLA to save
money? BruinGo! riders receive a smaller subsidy and have lower
incomes than solo drivers, but UCLA proposes to cut BruinGo!
services and charge for it.
Critics may ask whether UCLA’s transportation priorities
are right for a great university in a great city with horrendous
traffic congestion and air pollution. They may unfavorably compare
UCLA (which has 21,000 parking spaces and where 10,000 students
have parking permits) with Berkeley (which has only 7,000 parking
spaces). According to Berkeley’s Director of Parking and
Transportation, “The university has had a declining parking
supply for the past decade. We are an academic institution and our
first priority is teaching and research. We do have to put some
things first.”
It is hard to tell what comes first at UCLA. Cutting BruinGo! is
bad transportation policy, bad academic policy, bad economic
policy, bad environmental policy and bad neighbor policy. Despite
being asked to offer options to pay for BruinGo!, the
transportation services has instead produced only one option
““ cut the program and charge for it. Having put forward this
“option,” it now refuses to entertain other ideas, as
though bus riders were shiftless freeloaders who ought to pay
something. This “decide, announce, and defend” strategy
is not genuine consultation and it does not comport with
UCLA’s tradition of shared governance. Students, staff and
faculty pay for the transportation services, and we should be asked
what we prefer to do, rather than simply be told what the
transportation services has decided to do. But at the moment it
seems university policy is being set to please the transportation
services rather than the other way around.