The Graduate Student Council will soon finalize a one-year pilot program that will allow off-campus graduate students to ride the Caltrain for free.

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Jake Oktawiec

After working for nearly three years to help alleviate commuting costs for grad students, the GSC has worked out a deal with Caltrain to provide free passes.

According to Moriah Thomason, chair of the Graduate Student Council, the program recently received approval for funding from University Provost John Etchemendy and needs a few finishing touches before its implementation possibly by the end of winter quarter.

The GSC has been working to team up with Caltrain for over three years, former GSC Chair Steve Allison said. While the details are not finalized, he added that “grad students have been really excited” about the deal.

Transportation is one of the chief concerns of graduate students at Stanford, according to Allison. The prospective program “is our most popular advocacy effort,” he said, adding that riding the Caltrain is “almost prohibitively expensive” for graduate students.

GSC member Marcus Folch agreed. Folch, who lives in San Francisco and commutes twice a week to the Stanford campus said he spends about $20 per week on transportation.

Thomason, who estimated the average annual cost of transportation for a student living off campus to be $900, said she receives e-mails daily from graduate students asking for a program to help alleviate the costs of the Caltrain commute.

The pilot program is the first designed to help fund student use of Caltrain, which previously only negotiated with businesses for special programs and had not made deals for students.

“We really wanted to offer students the opportunity that staff has,” Thomason said, referring to Stanford’s two-year-old program that provides free rides on the Caltrain for all faculty and staff members.

With the stamp of approval for funding from Etchemendy and University Manager Chris Christofferson, the Department of Parking and Transportation must make changes to its system before it can begin distributing passes.

Both Caltrain and the University seem to be “playing the numbers to get the most benefit for the least money out of Stanford pockets,” Thomason said.

Once in effect, graduate students will only have to go through “a very simple process” to take part in the program, according to Allison.

Students will likely have to go to the Parking and Transportation Office and obtain a sticker for their student IDs that will act as train tickets. The program will only be open to students who do not live on land owned or leased by Stanford.

Graduate students said they are eager to take advantage of the opportunities made possible by free Caltrain rides. Thomason said that the new program will “change the way that students are able to live.”

The program is not all about student perks, however.

Thomason said that in order to provide funding, the program had to be proved significantly beneficial to the University.

Stanford has a deal with Santa Clara County to limit its traffic flow during peak commuting hours. In order to comply with the policy, Stanford created the Marguerite shuttle system, and the pilot program is a continuation of this effort, Thomason said. The University will also benefit from decreased demand for parking.

The pilot program will be reevaluated by both Caltrain and the University in 2006, Thomason said, and it will be renewed on a yearly basis should it be deemed successful.