Associated Students’ Gator Pass survey, which asked SF State students if they wanted to expand the current Gator Pass’ transportation reach, officially ended on March 30.
The survey was originally conducted between Feb. 14 to March 14, but was extended to March 30 due to low response rate. By the end of the survey, over 1,220 students had participated.
The current Gator Pass provides students with unlimited free rides on Muni and a 50% discount on BART rides to and from the Daly City station. This survey was conducted to see if students are open to expanding the Gator Pass to also include San Mateo’s SamTrans, which over 95.4% of students who took the survey were in favor of.
Despite this expansion initiative specifically pushing to include SamTrans, students were also asked if they were interested in other transits being included in the future. Students voted for BART, CalTrain, Golden Gate Transit, Marin Transit, Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority and AC Transit to be considered in future expansions.
In addition to multiple choice questions, the survey asked students to leave custom responses to better gauge student transportation needs. The survey responses were in favor of potentially expanding the BART discount to include other stations.
“Please expand the bart 50% coverage to more stations,” said one surveyor.
Another surveyor believes BART should not just be discounted, but completely free.
“It would be great to get 100% off BART included since so many students commute on BART daily.”
After the survey ended on Wednesday, the Student Fee Advisory Committee met on Friday to vote on whether to proceed with the next steps in the Gator Pass expansion initiative.
“We motioned and unanimously voted in support of recommending President Mahoney to expand the benefits of the Gator Pass to include SamTrans by the end of the next semester,” said AS President Joshua Ochoa. “It could easily happen before the semester begins, but we just wanted to create enough time so that they could implement the program into the interpass.”
The Gator Pass initiative is set to reach President Mahoney’s desk by the end of this week, and an official decision will be made by the end of April.
