Owning a personal vehicle doesn’t make your argument against a compulsory bus pass good. In fact, this grievance tends to be deeply classist.
I have been at Brock for nearly six years now, and every year, invariably, I hear the same argument about the compulsory bus fee that BUSU levies within undergraduates’ tuition costs as part of ancillary fees. The argument always boils down to this: “Why do I, a student who owns a vehicle, have to subsidize bus use for other students when I don’t use the bus and already have to pay a flat fee for a parking pass?”
The last point is true enough; parking pass prices are insane at Brock, and any effort to reduce those — without causing a negative financial, or otherwise, impact on non-pass holders — would be excellent. However, this still doesn’t make the argument for an opt-out option from the compulsory bus fee a strong one.
Typically, proponents of this argument claim that, by not having an option to opt-out of the bus fee, car owners are subsidizing bus users with no benefit to themselves. But this isn’t strictly true at all; even if you own a car, you can still use your student card to get the free transit that you’ve paid into whenever you want.
If, say, your car breaks down unexpectedly, you may draw on this benefit if the bus becomes your temporary or permanent alternative to getting to campus from then on. Moreover, if you are parked on campus for the day, but your friends want to go somewhere in the Niagara Region and they can’t all fit in your car, you can all bus there together. Maybe you want to study or grab food off campus and are feeling environmentally conscious, choosing to use the bus instead of driving to decrease your carbon footprint. There again, you’ll get to appreciate your student discount for bus fare. Even if in this hypothetical example you lose a few minutes waiting for the bus, you can at least enjoy doing work, responding to emails or sending texts while on the bus, which you can’t do when driving a car.
Even this misses the bigger point against the pro-opt-out camp, one which reveals a hypocrisy that is, I believe, deeply rooted in classism. To have an opt-out option from the bus because of car ownership means that students who use the bus are now effectively subsidizing car owners. For bus users, their fare discount will be reduced since the pool of money going towards the bus pass is diminished. This de facto subsidization doesn’t yield any benefits for students who rely on the bus for transportation to campus because it’s not like they get any formal carpooling benefits from car owners in this case. Notice how this dynamic is not the case the other way around; as was pointed out in myriad ways earlier, car owners can use the bus if they need to and enjoy their student discount just the same.
Pro-opt-outers should remember that owning a personal vehicle itself has class implications. I don’t need to produce a study to make the observation that those who use the bus are more likely than those who own personal vehicles to come from lower classes. With this understanding in mind, one can even argue that car ownership not granting students the right to opt-out of the bus fee is something of a progressive measure that minimally curtails the power of class advantages between Brock students.
So, respectfully, please shut up about how unfair it is that you can’t opt-out of the student bus fee — it’s rude.