What’s Next for Bay Pass?
This blog is another one of Berkeleys ‘Projects’. It highlights the pass that gets students to transit from Berkeley to San Francisco to see if they should terminate the pass due to low ride rates after the 2020 pandemic. Transit ridership had dropped tremendously during the pandemic and after it was over the numbers never seemed to recover. To address these issues 27 transit agencies worked together to create BayPass to fix the need for easier and more seamless Bay Area Transit. Participants of BayPass can receive unlimited access to bus, rail and ferry services. The way that you would get this pass is that you would be a randomly selected Berkeley student. The city would do this at no cost to UC Berkeley with the intention of growing the ridership. 2 million BayPass trips were recorded the first year that it came out. The uptrend from 2022 to 2023 were encouraging. BayPass is still in its early stages meaning that prices are yet to be determined. Although estimated costs were about $105 per student with a goal to make the price relatively neutral.
Within the article there is a BayPass fare calculator. This shows the readers if the pass would be worth it or not for your situation. You are able to input an estimated price for the pass, trip frequency, origin, and destination. Inputting these factors will show you the weekly cost with and without BayPass and how much each week you would save. This is an interesting way that Berkely gives the readers of The Daily Californian an option to interact with the site and the articles.
