76 percent of Americans commute to work by driving alone. But for many people, car dependency evaporates when they go to college.
In a 2014 analysis of per-capita transit utilization, FiveThirtyEight found that a plethora of college towns, sprinkled across red, purple, and blue states, boast ridership rates right up there with metropolises like San Francisco, Washington, and Chicago. The compact housing developments, concentrated job centers, and open-minded young populations inherent to campus environments make them natural fits for multimodal transportation.
Yet some incoming college students might not have any transit experience beyond enjoying train rides at theme parks. At college, they are likely to depend on the bus to get to their classes, jobs, and social outings – experiences that could shape their lifelong impressions of transit.
Davis, Ca. knows this. That’s why they’re actively publicizing their convenient transit system to the community and giving students a chance to become involved in its operations and management.
Whenever I visit Davis – my hometown – I have access to a diverse array of transportation options, thanks largely to the UC Davis campus. One can quickly and easily get anywhere in town via the local Unitrans bus system, which the university’s student government oversees, or via bicycle. (Davis was the first U.S. city – and still one of only five – with cycling infrastructure the League of American Bicyclists has deemed worthy of its highest Platinum rating.)
In contrast to other Northern California transit systems, including Yolobus (serving the entirety of the county) and Regional Transit (nearby Sacramento’s light rail and bus system), Unitrans has largely bucked the harmful trend of declining ridership that has hurt transportation in many parts of the country. It posted year-over-year increases during the latter part of FY 2017 after resolving a driver shortage and moves nearly 4 million riders annually.
Approximately 90 percent of Unitrans passengers use the bus system for travel to or from UC Davis. A tuition fee subsidizes undergraduate students’ trips, effectively turning the tables on the high fixed costs of car ownership that can incentivize people to drive everywhere. Jeff Flynn, the agency’s general manager, said that ridership numbers strongly correlate with student enrollment, explaining that many of the system’s passengers commute from relatively outlying apartment complexes beyond comfortable cycling distance from the school.
“People need to get to campus somehow,” Flynn said. “Parking is very expensive, but Unitrans feels like a free trip.”
Unitrans uses some creative solutions to accommodate the resulting crowds its famous fleet of repurposed double-decker buses from London.
Flynn made it clear that high-capacity, fixed-route service is the optimal way to match the high demand.
“Our riders love Uber and Lyft and use them at times when they need to, like early mornings and weekends,” he explained. “But our productivity is so high that I don’t think could handle the load we carry during our regular hours of service.”
Flynn said that most students are not transit users when they arrive to campus. He takes pride in the opportunity to provide them a new experience, embracing the role Unitrans’s service could play in encouraging students to continue using non-car modes even after they graduate.
“We attend all the welcome events for freshmen and let them know is a service they can ride,” he explained. “We also target apartment complexes and distribute schedules.”
Once students start riding, the onboard environment helps make them comfortable with their newfound option. Vehicles are clean and fellow students drive the buses. In addition to operating the system, students also can work on Unitrans’s management side – perhaps the dream college job of any aspiring transit savior. Sure enough, the university also boasts a nationally renowned transportation institute.
Unitrans forwards $175,000 of its annual tuition fee to Yolobus, allowing UC Davis students to also ride that system without paying an onboard fare. The Yolobus atmosphere can be quite different from that aboard Unitrans – for example, the hourly route between Davis and Sacramento traverses a street lined with some infamous motels – but Flynn explained that, after riding the bus within Davis, students become open to using transit to access other parts of the region. Yolobus serves the same on-campus bus terminals Unitrans does, facilitating relatively seamless connectivity and a comfortable rider experience.
“I think the beauty of Unitrans is that it serves a small community,” Flynn explained. “If works here, maybe it can also work somewhere else.”
Many college towns still have work to do
While Davis demonstrates that the college lifestyle can mesh well with multimodal transportation, some other campuses are as auto-dependent as can be. Wayne State University, situated near the heart of Detroit, is bottom of the league with 98 percent of students bringing personal cars to campus.
But there’s a diverse spectrum separating schools like Wayne State that might as well offer drive-in classes and those like UC Davis that have embraced non-car modes. The graduate school I attended, UC San Diego, exemplifies such middle ground.
Situated adjacent to the dense, booming University Towne Center (UTC) neighborhood, which many consider San Diego’s second downtown, UCSD has incredible transportation potential that the city’s Metropolitan Transit System is trying to capture. Frequent, often-packed circulator bus service serves well-built stops on and near campus, and a light rail extension that will allow for one-seat train rides through downtown to the U.S.-Mexico border crossing is currently under construction.
Thanks to a tuition fee (comparable to that Unitrans receives) I could use almost all transit throughout San Diego County free of charge. However, a substantial portion of my classmates still purchased expensive parking passes, drove to class daily, and gawked at me upon learning I got where I needed to go without driving. Many of them lived in a graduate housing complex cut off from campus by fences and a freeway, and their only viable non-car connections to campus were a circuitous, oft-delayed, weekday-only campus shuttle route or a hilly bike ride containing terrifying in-traffic stretches.
Seeing these barriers helped motivate me to work with my colleagues at Circulate San Diego, the transportation-focused nonprofit I interned for, to draft a letter to the school asking them to consider multimodal solutions to their parking challenges. Among the most convincing support we found for our platform was a presentation illustrating that easy-to-implement TDM strategies had helped the formerly auto-dependent university become a more multimodal place.
In utilizing such strategies, UCSD – as well as countless other schools trying to make their campuses more enjoyable places to work and study at – could encourage their students to spread new, positive impressions of multimodality as they graduate and venture out into the world.
Photo by Unitrans.