The wheels on the blue buses go round and round, but the gears grinding behind the scenes at Off Campus College Transport (OCCT) need some inspection.
OCCT has faced intensified public scrutiny because of what many see as decreased reliability — missing or late buses are becoming commonplace. If something like the popular “TrollCCT” Facebook page is of any indication, students have not been shy about their qualms with the free bus service. Their gripes — and ours — are only bound to escalate when the newly reinstated guest pass policy reverberates through the campus community.
When the card scanners for blue buses were introduced, their main purpose, according to then-OCCT CEO Jared Kirschenbaum, was to promote good behavior as an extra precaution, as well as to figure out which routes were most efficient by tracking how riders use the buses.
OCCT now says that the scanners are intended to “increase rider accountability.” After the Phil Calderon scandal, verifying that each rider was a Binghamton University student became OCCT’s priority. In an effort to extend that accountability to guests, OCCT has created some bumps in the road.
The addition of scanners didn’t really inconvenience riders, but it hasn’t benefited us either. Before the scanners, the buses were no less safe than they are now, and the new guest pass policy is another move in the name of aimless reform.
The policy dictates that students must register guests at the OCCT offices in the New University Union, giving guests a week-long pass to ride the buses. OCCT felt a stricter guest policy needed to be instated after buses became equipped with ID scanners in January, but this is the wrong way to go about doing so.
The old policy allowed students to bring aboard with them one guest per ID. It was fair and it worked. It’s not like students, however belligerent they may be, are going to pick up a hobo or weapon-wielding criminal from Court Street and invite them to come back to campus. Guests are often friends or siblings, people who are college or high school students themselves and do not pose any real threat to safety.
This was a system that was not broken and the OCCT is throwing a kink into something that was working just fine. The new guest policy doesn’t do anything to further improve the accountability of guest riders than did the old system of showing your ID on the spot.
Making a student travel to the New Union during a specific window of time instead of just letting them show their ID at the bus does not improve anything.
The new guest policy is just another blemish in the poor semester OCCT seems to be having. Although free to ride, we indirectly pay for the funding of OCCT through our annual student activity fee. The blue buses are the most instrumental device in transporting students, but they are quickly falling out of our good graces.