Wake Tech students can now get a free ride — on public buses throughout the Triangle
More than 74,000 people taking classes at Wake Technical Community College are now able to ride public buses throughout the Triangle for free.
Students with a current ID and enrolled in at least one class on campus can obtain a GoPass, good for free trips on all GoTriangle, GoRaleigh, GoDurham and GoCary buses seven days a week. Wake Tech is purchasing the passes to help make it easier for people to become and remain students at Wake Tech, said college president Scott Ralls.
“Access to higher education, transportation to Wake Tech, is much less a barrier than it has been before,” Ralls said at a press conference Monday. “Many of our students live on the edge. Some of their challenges can be challenges of child care, can be challenges of housing, can be challenges of food. We try to eliminate as many of those challenges as we can, and we know that transportation can be a core challenge for many of our students.”
The passes are also available to more than 2,400 full- and part-time Wake Tech faculty and staff.
Wake Tech is among about two dozen companies, schools and local governments that pay for GoPass cards so their students and employees can ride for free. Durham Tech has had a GoPass program for seven years that lets students ride to and from its campuses on GoDurham and GoTriangle buses on weekdays when school is in session.
Wake Tech will pay GoTriangle up to $15,000 for the first year of the GoPass, the equivalent of 5,545 day passes good for about 11,000 one-way trips. Future payments could be adjusted upward, depending on how many people take advantage of the program.
“We see it as a bargain for our students,” Ralls said. “Because we don’t want any student to decide not to come because they can’t get here.”
This is not the first time Wake Tech has subsidized transportation for its students. The college pays GoRaleigh $400,000 a year to operate the Wake Tech Express between downtown Raleigh and the college’s Southern Wake Campus off U.S. 401. In return GoRaleigh has made GoPasses available to all students, faculty and staff good for throughout its system. Wake Tech says the arrangement with GoRaleigh resulted in more than 145,000 bus rides in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2019.
Wake Tech students and employees can get a GoPass at ID offices on the school’s Southern Wake, Scott Northern Wake, Perry Health Sciences or RTP campuses. To use the pass, they’ll need to show a current Wake Tech ID when they board a bus.
The great majority of students and staff drive to Wake Tech; as the GoPass program was announced, students circled the parking lots at Scott Northern Wake Campus searching in vain for open spaces. It’s not clear if free bus passes will get many of them to leave their cars at home.
But transit agencies are increasingly looking at eliminating fares as a way to entice riders. In 2018, GoTriangle, GoRaleigh, GoCary and GoDurham began issuing a Youth GoPass to teens age 13 to 18 that allows them to ride anywhere those bus systems go. More than 9,000 had been issued by December 2019 and used for more than 730,000 trips.
And Chapel Hill Transit buses have been free since 2002, thanks in large part to a subsidy provided by UNC Chapel Hill. Ridership jumped 42 percent the first year fares were abolished.
Michael Parker, a Chapel Hill Town Council member who heads the GoTriangle board of trustees, said Monday that fare-free buses should be a strategy to reduce carbon emissions in the face of climate change.
“I think it is a goal we should aspire to,” Parker said. “I don’t know a time frame, but I think if we truly want to make transportation accessible, if we really want to get people out of their cars ... one of the best ways to do that is public transit.”
This story was originally published March 2, 2020 at 12:52 PM.
