The E Route, abridged

It seems there’s no refuge from high gas prices, not even in public transportation. Last week, the Campus Bus Service shortened the E route, which will no longer service the College Mall area. In so doing, the service angered a sizable number of students, mostly those who live in on-campus apartments and those without private transportation. Many rely on the bus service to go to the supermarket and run other errands. Those individuals now face a much longer and more circuitous commute.\nThe Bus Service paints a picture of forced circumstances. In a country where fuel now costs more than $4 a gallon, that’s easy enough to understand. Moreover, the scheduled increase in funding won’t be enough to cover the rising cost of fuel, let alone other expenses, like the drivers’ union’s scheduled pay increase.\nThe Apartment and Family Student Council, essentially to on-campus apartment renters what the Residence Hall Association is to students living in dorms, also finds fault with how the news was broken. Kent McDaniel, the executive director for transportation, said he didn’t issue a press release and only used the service’s Web site and schedule pamphlets to inform riders of the change. It was apparently not sufficient. The change seemed sudden to most, and didn’t give them enough time to arrange alternate transportation.\nWhat’s curious about all of this, however, is how the bus service is paid for. In 2000, IUSA asked the University for universal access to the bus service. Students are now charged a motor pool fee from their tuition and in return got to use the buses free of charge. Usually, systems like that don’t run well, but McDaniel says that it actually helped. Most transportation systems are subsidized anyway, and money collected from fares represents only a fraction of the funding the system receives.\nBut maybe it’s time to return to a private system, where people pay for fares based on services used. It would help the Campus Bus Service accurately evaluate which routes are most important to students by setting prices on routes that accurately reflect the cost of the journey. If a route becomes more expensive, the bus service could simply charge more, and if students care about it enough to pay the higher fare, the route would be preserved. Those routes that are inessential would be eliminated. Moreover, students wouldn’t be billed for routes they don’t use.\nThe potential problem here is that students don’t usually carry fare money on them, and thus might be unable to pay for bus rides if they forget their change. This could be remedied with a one-time improvement to buses that allow a campus-access type payment for routes. It might be expensive initially, but it would solve the problem for good.\nHere as with many elements, it seems the main problem in many of IU’s financial endeavors is the elimination of competitive, “pay-as-you-go” pricing in favor of blanket charges for services rendered. But what these practices add in convenience, they lose in efficacy. And many students obviously want their route back, badly enough that they’d most likely be willing to pay for it. They should have that opportunity.