Madalyn Godfrey/ Fourth Estate
Mason weighs the pros and cons of the U-Pass system for students
BY ALEXANDRA HENRIQUES, STAFF WRITER
During the 2024 spring semester, Mason students began seeing flyers at campus bus stops attempting to gauge their interest in the U-Pass Initiative. This initiative is a program by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) granting students unlimited rides throughout Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C. and southern Maryland. With U-Pass, travel on Metrorail and Metrobus would only cost a dollar per day.
Of 28,000 Mason undergraduate students, only 5,858 lived on campus during the 2023-24 academic year. With 21% of the undergraduate population on campus, the remaining 79% were commuters.
Director of Parking and Transportation at Mason Josh Cantor said that the student support for the initiative is split.
“The number one reason we haven’t done [U-Pass] is it’s incredibly expensive for the
University,” Cantor said. ”The way the U-Pass system works is WMATA charges the institution a dollar a day for every student the school has, not every student who uses it. So we have 28,000 full-time students at Mason…that would be $28,000 a day. This one program would be more than our entire transportation budget.”
With no funding for the initiative, a fee would have to be added to student tuition to cover U-Pass for all full-time Mason students. This fee could range anywhere from $200 to $350 annually. American University enacted the U-Pass program in 2016, though it came with a $250 student fee. However, Cantor said that they have easier access to a metro station, whereas the nearest metro station, Vienna/Fairfax-GMU, is 4 miles from Mason’s Fairfax campus.
Cantor said that only 20% of commuter students live in areas with direct metro access, which leaves most students paying for a program that would not benefit their daily transportation needs.
Georgetown University’s pilot program allowed interested students to register for the initiative to receive the benefits of U-Pass. If a similar model is followed, an enrollment-based U-Pass program could curb expenses for both Mason and its students.
A U-Pass program presents another option for students commuting between the Fairfax and Arlington campuses. According to Cantor, a new building is planned to open on the Arlington campus within a year that could increase the number of students traveling between campuses. Cantor acknowledged that when having 50 people traveling at once, trains are more efficient than buses. Once constructed, Mason will assess whether the U-Pass system would be preferred for transportation.
WMATA has encountered economic challenges over the past few years. This includes a projected $750 million budget deficit for Fiscal Year 2025. Problems include low ridership, depletion of federal pandemic relief funds and fare evasion, causing reduction in services provided. Instead of utilizing the metro, Mason’s Department of Transportation is looking at alternatives such as more shuttles, bike-share programs and carpooling.
“In a perfect world, we would be able to throw money at [WMATA] because, from our university’s sustainability perspective, we want students to be able to use transit and not have to drive,” Cantor said.
