External bus revenue necessary

Recently, the public transportation provided by both IU Campus Bus Service and Bloomington Transit have been cut by about 19 percent and 3 percent, respectively, due to the rising cost of diesel fuel and other expenses. Both transportation operators have had to cut services because of a lack of additional revenue to cover rapidly increasing costs.

I want to present information to the IU student body that forms the basis for the restoration and the future expansion of both IU Campus Bus and Bloomington Transit services.

I have chaired the Student Transportation Board and its predecessor, the Student Transportation Advisory Committee, for the past two academic years. We have met regularly to review public transportation services the mandatory student transportation fee provides. Further, we represent 88 percent of the total public transportation passengers in Bloomington and provide a collective $3.9 million, the single largest source of funding for public transportation in the Bloomington community. Each of us will pay $109.92 during the coming academic year in mandatory student transportation fees. Therefore, IU students have a vested interest in an efficient and growing public transportation service for campus and the city of Bloomington.

In early 2007, Dean of Students and Vice Provost for Student Affairs Dick McKaig asked us to perform a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) Analysis on public transportation services funded by the student transportation fee.

We found that the most serious (and unfortunately, obvious) weakness was the lack of a diversified funding base for the Campus Bus Service. We also found the entire Bloomington community was not receiving all the federal and state funding for which it was eligible. However, there is an opportunity to work with Bloomington Transit to increase federal and state public transportation funding for the community by unifying IU Campus Bus Service and Bloomington Transit.

Many of the SWOT recommendations have already been implemented, such as combining evening and weekend dispatching, the fueling and cleaning of all buses by a single crew and other plans for IU Campus Bus Service and Bloomington Transit to reduce costs. Further, all of our findings and recommendations were confirmed by a group of graduate accounting students from the Kelley School of Business in a project that was conducted during the 2007 fall semester.

Statistically, by combining the ridership of IU Campus Bus with Bloomington Transit, we could acquire millions of dollars in additional funding for public transportation in this community. Currently, Bloomington doesn’t count almost 66 percent of its total ridership in state and federal government funding formulas because IU Campus Bus Service’s 3.3 million annual passengers are not included with Bloomington Transit’s 2.8 million.

I urge all IU students who use public transportation to contact IU administrators and City of Bloomington elected officials to move along the process of securing external funding, a process that has been underway for the past year or so. Public transportation should have a promising future for the IU and Bloomington community, and the time has come for our voices to ensure that future.