Starting Tuesday, U-Pass, the University's bus pass system, will no longer be free for faculty and staff members.
U-Pass, founded in fall 2005 by ASU Parking & Transit Services, previously offered free, unlimited Valley Metro bus passes to students, staff and faculty.
The service will continue to be free for students, but any University employees who wish to renew their service will be paying at least $260 a year, said Karen Bielak, information specialist for ASU Parking & Transit Services
Bielak said the reason for cutting the free faculty and staff U-Passes was increased bus pass prices from Valley Metro.
The company's rates went up in December, Bielak said, and that affected the U-Pass system.
"The cost to buy those passes has gone up," she said. "You can't go and buy a pass for the same cost you could a year ago."
Starting Tuesday, ASU will purchase the passes from Valley Metro at full price, and then offer them to students for free and to faculty and staff at less than half the purchase cost, she said.
About 3,000 faculty and staff members use the U-Pass program, Bielak said, and there were about 1.5 million boardings on Valley Metro buses by U-Pass users in the last fiscal year.
Despite having faculty and staff pay for their passes, she said, ASU Parking & Transit Services still pays about $2 million a year for the service, the same as it did before the price hike at Valley Metro.
"By having that little bit of a cutback, it brings us back to numbers where we were," she said.
A local transit pass permits access to normal bus routes and the light-rail, and it will cost University employees $260, Bielak said.
An express pass permits access to normal routes and the light-rail and express bus routes, she said. That pass costs $390.
Purchasing a transit pass from Valley Metro would cost $540 for the local pass and $816 for the express pass.
"There's no cheaper alternative," Bielak said. "What we offer is the only thing out there."
If the change hadn't been made, Parking & Transit Services may not have been able to continue the program, she said.
"It's not that we're just raising the cost because of light-rail," she said. "There's just no other option."
The pass is guaranteed to be free for students from July 1 to June 30, 2009, Bielak said, though that may not be the case after then.
"The decision to charge students in the future is something we're considering," she said. "As for right now, we're still pleased that we're able to offer it for free to the students."
Math professor Lance Ward has been teaching at ASU for about 15 years.
Ward said he used to drive to school, but because he lives only about eight miles from campus, he sometimes takes the bus instead.
"Once in a while if I thought I'd be using the bus, I'd buy the monthly pass for $34," he said.
After ASU Parking & Transit Services offered the free bus pass system, Ward said he started taking the bus almost every day, unless he had to have a vehicle on campus.
With a 31-day full fare local bus pass costing up to $45 a month, Ward said, it makes sense to buy the local service U-Pass from ASU for $260, which comes out to just under $22 a month.
"So ASU will still be subsidizing my bus fare, just not as much as before," Ward said.
But compared to skyrocketing gas prices, paying for a bus pass is still cheaper, he said.
"It's not that big of a problem," he said. "I was surprised that they subsidized it for two whole years."
Reach the reporter at: allison.denny@asu.edu.
