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NewsvineAfter more than a year of long and agitated deliberations between graduate students and the University, the GO Pass referendum placed on the ASSU spring ballot by the Graduate Student Council (GSC) failed to pass last week.
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The GO Pass program subsidizes train passes for graduate students who live off campus, providing them with unlimited use of the Caltrain. The Office of the Provost agreed to fund the GO Pass for 2007, but no funding has been approved by the Provost’s Office for 2008 and beyond.
Last week’s failed referendum received only 43 percent of graduate votes, compared with 61 percent last year, according to Psychology graduate student Jessica Cameron, who is one of three leaders of the Go Pass action committee.
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like we managed to convince on-campus grad students that they could save money,” she said.
Before elections week, the GO Pass action committee took steps to determine whether the GO Pass would indeed benefit graduate students who live on campus. According to Cameron, the committee conducted a survey in early April and sent it to graduate mailing lists. Graduate students were also encouraged to take the survey online in the Grad Events Web site.
According to the survey, nearly half of the 177 respondents currently live on campus, and 28 percent of them cited cost as the main factor in deciding how to get off-campus. Most of the opposition to the GO Pass program has been to the $106 fee per graduate student.
On-campus students currently spend about $21 per quarter on Caltrain transportation, compared to $54 per quarter on gas to destinations within the Caltrain corridor — including airports. This figure does not include parking, maintenance and ownership costs. The data was compiled and analyzed by Adam Millard-Ball, a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources.
The results also state that on-campus students make an average of 11 trips to places along the Caltrain corridor each quarter, including an average of 4.6 trips to San Francisco. Currently, Caltrain use for these trips is about 14 percent — 26 percent for trips to San Francisco.
The results of the survey also cite the environmental benefits of the program and the subsidies car owners who park on Stanford property could receive if the Go Pass program were to continue.
According to Cameron, the GO Pass action committee had expected students to take public transportation more often if the referendum had passed. Similar free transit programs at universities such as UC-San Diego, UC-Santa Cruz and UT Austin have increased the use of public transportation by between 71 to 200 percent, Cameron said.
“We were expecting, based on this survey and similar findings at other schools, that Caltrain use would at least double among on-campus grad students,” she said.
Since the GO Pass referendum did not pass, funding sources for the program for 2008 and beyond are yet to be determined.