Charley Guptill: UCLA Transportation should subsidize Metro bus lines

Getting out of the Westwood bubble has proven to be a crucial part of my UCLA education. Unfortunately, during much of my first and second years here, exploring Los Angeles actually just meant traveling even farther west than Westwood.

Getting to the Third Street Promenade was the easiest option for a weekend day trip. When I was an underclassman, a 25-cent ride on a Big Blue Bus was the most accessible and inexpensive way to get away from campus – although the price has since risen to a still-affordable 50 cents. When planning an adventure, the cheapness of the Big Blue Bus funneled my choices and my free time into spots on the Westside.

While the difference of a dollar or so doesn’t seem significant, when making spur-of-the-moment decisions about where to spend a sunny afternoon, it weighs heavily.

Sure, Santa Monica is cute, and Venice’s hipness and food trucks are alluring, but with such a wealth of culture and diversity in the parts of Los Angeles east of campus, a more even distribution of off-campus excursions would have had a much more profound effect on my experience as a new Angeleno.

UCLA currently subsidizes single rides for the Big Blue Bus and the Culver CityBus lines, but it does not do so for the Metro bus lines. This uneven subsidy influences the choices students make when deciding where to go within Los Angeles and hinders students from cultivating a well-rounded knowledge of their surroundings.

Students are nudged toward Santa Monica and Venice, areas that are predominantly white and higher income. While the Big Blue Bus has one bus that run to downtown, service is limited and does not provide a feasible way for students to traverse the varied landscape between downtown and the Westside.

Los Angeles is a city made up of individual communities and neighborhoods, each with their own valuable institutions. Encouraging students, even subtly, to stay on the Westside inhibits their ability to fully understand Los Angeles and take advantage of its opportunities.

Students who have a more developed relationship with Los Angeles are also more likely to stay in the city after graduation, solidifying the relationship between UCLA and its environs.

Metro buses allow students to visit places like Koreatown and Los Feliz. But it costs students three times as much to take a single ride on a Metro bus as it does to ride a Big Blue Bus one.

UCLA is not arbitrarily enforcing this uneven subsidy. The Big Blue Bus and Culver CityBus are equipped with card readers that allow UCLA students to swipe their BruinCard to receive their discount. Metro buses do not have this feature and, because of their large ridership, a special accommodation for UCLA students wouldn’t be entirely feasible.

Still, UCLA Transportation should be investigating creative solutions to this problem.

A UCLA spokesperson said in an email that a feasible system does not exist to provide students with discounted single-ride Metro tokens. But this challenge is worth taking on.

Subsidization of single bus rides matters. UCLA is inadvertently encouraging its students to stay on the Westside. It is making it easier and cheaper to go to Santa Monica, which has a significantly lower level of racial and ethnic diversity than the city of Los Angeles, not to mention a median annual household income that is $22,526 higher.

UCLA needs to emphasize the value of diversity through its transportation policy, even if that means pulling money from single rides to Santa Monica, Venice and Culver City. UCLA Transportation, which subsidizes bus passes and tokens on various lines, has a budget of about $2.6 million a year.

Of course, it is hard to complain too much about spending three dollars to visit Little Tokyo. But when you only need to spend one dollar to get to Main Street in Santa Monica, something seems off.

If it was as inexpensive to get around Los Angeles by Metro bus as it is to get to the beach, I would have spent much less time eating frozen yogurt next to palm trees and more time choosing which Metro bus to ride instead of deciding whether I would ride one at all.

We only have a few years as students, and spending a lot of time on the pier is perhaps not as exciting or educational as the more metropolitan alternative.

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