Paying for Campus Transit ServicesPublic transit systems, whether serving large or small urban areas, vibrant university communities or declining rural areas, depend on a variety of funding sources to pay for the desired levels of service. One of the key policy issues facing a community is to determine how to pay for the desired transit services knowing that the needs for transit will always exceed available funding. Until the 1960s, public transit was predominately a private sector activity with all costs paid by passengers. However, over the past 30-40 years, a partnership has been formed between users and non-users to pay for public transportation. A major activity of transit managers and policy boards has been piecing together this funding puzzle involving user fees (fares), state, federal, and local government contributions. In addition, university transit systems have creatively used non-traditional funding sources such as student fees, parking revenues, and other sources. Table 2.2 University -- Transit Agency Relationships and Student Involvement on Transit Authority Policy and operating Boards Source: (7)
The TCRP Synthesis found that the specific sources of funds used by campus transit systems vary widely and depend on a variety of local factors. First, if the transit system is considered a public transit agency eligible for state and federal funds as is the transit service in the Fargo-Moorhead area, these important operating assistance resources, when combined with local government matching funds, provide a major portion of the transit system's income. According to the TCRP survey, 20 of the 28 systems reporting financial data include federal, state, or local operating assistance in their revenue mix. All 8 of the systems not using government transit funding are departments within a university and either have not requested or have not been offered use of these funds. The latter case is the more likely situation since a regional transit agency in the same area is often the "designated recipient" for the grant funding and uses all funding available for its operation. Furthermore, access to these government funds is one of the major motivating factors for university-run transit systems to either merge or turn over their campus transit operations to the regional provider. Obviously, campus transit systems that do not use federal, state, or local transit funds to support their service need to develop other income sources; student fees and parking permit revenue are the most common sources in these cases. However, student fees and parking revenue also provide significant funding for systems that do receive government operating assistance. These fees substitute for farebox revenue for systems that offer prepaid, unlimited-access service. As can be seen from Table 2.3, 90 percent of the TCRP survey respondents had some form of prepaid or unlimited access service, so these alternate sources of funding are key to their operations. Table 2.4 identifies the proportion of transit income these systems receive from non-transit grant sources. Table 2.3 Payment Method For Campus Transit Systems Source: (7)
Student Fees Student fees represent a form of funding unique to college and university communities. Table 2.5 summarizes the fee information obtained from the survey respondents and includes information on 17 systems that reported using student fees to partially or totally fund unlimited access services. As can be seen, these fees represent from 11 to 100 percent of a system's income and range from $8 to more than $50 per semester. In most cases student fees designed to support transit must win the approval of students in some form of referendum. Each university has different rules regarding the way these referenda are proposed and the exact voting rules that are applied. Nevertheless, these student votes are often one of the most important, yet time consuming parts of an effort to expand transit services using student fees. Finally, the TCRP survey respondents were asked if the student fees that were used to support their systems needed to be periodically renewed by referendum. Fifteen systems that imposed student fees answered this question and were about evenly split in their responses. Eight of the 15 did not require a referendum to periodically renew the student fee; seven did. Table 2.4 Sources of Revenue for Campus Transit Operations Source: (7)
Table 2.5 Summary of Student Transit Fees for Prepaid and/or Unlimited Access Systems Source: (7)
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