The bus passes offered for any undergraduate have long been a staple of student life on campus. Many students who live on campus or just off campus rely on the buses to get back and forth from school. Those on campus also rely on buses to get to locations like the store or other locations required by a class like a park, art gallery or museum.
This semester, however, the transportation fee was cut and in return the school has stopped its supply of bus passes that used to be open to any student. Some have complained that the bus passes were being advertised as late as the April 2024 open house, which means many incoming students were expecting the ability to be able to rely on a pass only to find out that they can no longer receive one included in their transportation fee.
The issue began in 2022 when the university and the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority (NFTA) ended their agreement for the College Riders Accessing Metro (CRAM) Passes. The CRAM Passes are advertised on the NFTA as allowing students to “provide all students of participating universities unlimited access to the Metro Bus and Rail system, seven days a week at a significantly discounted rate.”
The CRAM passes were offered on a yearly basis and covered both semesters. In the summer of 2022 this agreement came to an end with the university reasoning that due to the lowered number of students who were using the passes it did not make financial sense to renew the agreement for further years.
The CRAM Pass was replaced by a new agreement between the university and the NFTA, where the university would instead offer monthly bus passes. That same semester Parking Services stated in an email that they saw an “unexpected 37.5% increase in demand for passes over our largest dispersal of any month last academic year.”
The system seemed to work fine until The Record received an email from a group of anonymous students in November 2023. The group of students contacted The Record about their concerns that the school did not have the bus passes for that month yet. The bus passes the school had switched over to were only good for one calendar month and when the month changed the pass would no longer be acknowledged by the bus’s scanner. Up until this point the school had always had the next month’s passes in the week before so students wouldn’t have to pay out of pocket at the start of a month.
Parking Services had an explanation for the late bus passes that month. The NFTA had made overall changes to the pass system, replacing monthly passes with a new MetGo pass. Parking services explained that the reason passes were late was because Buffalo State was not the only client that needed to obtain passes and that due to the change over to a new type of passes, it took longer for the expected passes to arrive.
After the month of November no major developments took place until the fall semester of Spring 2024. It had been announced that due to a reduction in the transportation fee students were no longer able to receive a bus pass included with their fees and instead would have to buy a MetGo pass from the school bookstore.
This caused outrage among the student populace and a petition was started by Jamie Ervolina and boasts nearly 700 signatures of students requesting the school bring back the included bus passes. A friend of Ervolina, Ashley Sprenger, then contacted the paper to try and get more eyes on the issue. In the email she states that “Many students rely on these bus passes for various reasons, whether for transportation to campus or students living in the dorms needing transportation to a store or doctors’ office.” and “In the comments section of the petition, many students and parents of students voiced their opinions about the lack of free bus passes and the various reasons they rely on them.”
The issue continued to be a talking point, especially in the United Students Government (USG) and College Senate, and on October 25 of this year the Interim Vice President for Management and Operations made an announcement of a new Transportation Assistance Appeals system. The announcement states that “one-time funding has been identified with the aim to address the most pressing needs until a long-term solution is established.”
Further in the announcement they reveal that a Bus Pass Appeals Committee will be formed and oversee the process of “accommodating such transportation needs during this transitional period.” Students will have to complete a bus pass appeal form first to see if they qualify and the committee promises a response within 30 days of a submission.
The announcement makes it clear that this issue is persistent and will most likely continue to evolve in the coming years but the Appeals system is a step in the right direction.
