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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.

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