It’s red light for “GO Passes,” as graduate students used to riding the Caltrain to and from classes at a discount will need to start searching for new ways to commute.

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Alvin Chow

No more subsidized Caltrain passes for commuting students.

The Graduate Student Council Parking and Transportation Board announced recently that the University will no longer be able to provide off-campus students with yearlong Caltrain passes, known as GO Passes, as it has done for the past two years.

The GO Pass was initiated by Caltrain several years ago as an easy way to provide discount train passes to businesses in the area, said Martin Mueller, Chairman of the Parking and Transportation Board. If companies want to buy the GO Pass, they are forced to purchase one for each of their employees, even if not all will use it. At around $100 per year, the GO Pass is certainly not cheap, he noted, but employees see it as “an attractive salary benefit.”

In 2004, the University negotiated a contract with Caltrain to provide passes for each off-campus grad student. In the first year of this program, the University offered the passes to students free of charge.

However, purchasing one pass for each off-campus grad student — there are 3,200 of them — at $100 each cost the University $320,000 annually, a price that Mueller called “quite high.” But many students took advantage of the subsidized ticket. While it was free, 2,000 out of the 3,200 eligible students used the pass.

This year the P&T Board decided to charge students who wished to use the pass $60 in an effort to defray costs to the University.

When passes were no longer complimentary just 1,100 students purchased the GO Pass, Mueller said. The P&T Board interpreted this dropoff as a signal that students do not depend heavily on the pass, since they are not willing to pay $60 for it, he said.

At last year’s student election, the Graduate Student Council included a special fee proposal for transportation on the ballot. The measure would have charged all graduate students a general parking and transportation fee to raise funds to provide off-campus students with GO Passes as well as transportation services for students living on campus, such as airport shuttles.

However, he said the proposal failed to receive the 65 percent majority required for special fees requests, and no University funds are currently allotted to provide subsidized GO Passes for students next calendar year.

But the P&T Board refuses to admit defeat. Mueller pledged to keep negotiating internally and with University administrators to provide commuting solutions for off-campus students.

“We are working toward a proposal for continuing the GO Pass program into 2007 as well as a plan for sustainable funding for 2008 and beyond,” Mueller said.

The committee plans to present its ideas at the GSC meeting Nov. 3.