Students deserve a better transportation system – regardless of what caused the fatal December bus crash

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We still don’t know what happened when UC Santa Cruz bus driver Dan Stevenson’s bus crashed into a stone kiln on campus just before the winter holiday break. The official investigation is not complete and UCSC remains tight-lipped about an official cause. 

This, naturally, has caused rumors to flourish, particularly the largely held student view that the crash came as a result of poorly maintained UCSC buses, as described in a Lookout Community Voices opinion piece by UCSC student Sebastián Valdez that appeared before the crash. 

Even if the rumors about the accident are not true – and I hope and tend to believe they are not –  issues about Transportation and Parking Services (TAPS) bus service and its relationship to the bus services provided by Metro remain. Metro, to its credit, has made dramatic improvements to university bus runs. But students are still putting up with over-full buses and often have to wait for several buses before they can board on the way to class. This is especially true since the university has taken more buses off the road to conduct inspections.

I knew Dan. He was a well-liked union activist with local SMART 23 who had worked as a driver for Santa Cruz Metro and, in recent years, as a TAPS driver at UCSC. He was a true public servant and committed to his riders and the bus system.

Currently, both TAPS and Metro operate two-way bus service around the broad “loop” serving UCSC colleges. TAPS also operates other routes that cut across the loop, as well as shuttle services for students with disabilities on campus and a few other services. Only the Metro buses leave the loop to go downtown, to Pacific Station between Front Street and Pacific Avenue. Anyone can board a TAPS bus for free, and students showing a student card can board any Metro bus without paying an additional fee.

This is a great service for students, many of whom don’t have cars. It’s also something students pay for: Whether they ride the bus or not, each student pays $171 per quarter – one of the highest bus fees in the country to support the service. Past surveys (I believe the most recent one was about three years ago, before the last campaign to raise the transportation fee) show students support both the convenience of the bus system and the environmental benefits public transit creates.

In my view, they should be getting better service for the money they pay. 

Here’s the problem. 

It starts with the state’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which mandates that neither university funds nor California state funds will be used to subsidize student housing, food or transportation. 

TAPS bus service relies on the student transportation fee, as I explained, and on parking fees collected on campus.

For many years now, students and other members of the community have wondered why the loop bus services TAPS and Metro provide have not been merged into a single system. This question is returning with a new urgency because of students’ legitimate concerns about the state of repair of the TAPS bus fleet. Common sense makes one wonder why the two systems have not been merged for efficiency.

At one point years ago, the competition between drivers from the two systems led to dangerous struggles between drivers about who would be the first bus into a stop. The first bus got more riders and the systems would count the riders in statistical summaries to funders. Fortunately, this struggle was resolved before any accidents occurred.

But why haven’t the two systems been merged before now? 

Union work rules are at the root of the problem. Metro drivers are paid significantly better and have a much better benefits package than the TAPS drivers represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). SMART 23, which represents the Metro drivers, has contracts that do not allow any part-time employment, while many, if not most of the AFSCME-represented drivers for TAPS are part-time employees. In the past, students served as bus drivers, but that has not been the case for decades.

SMART 23 is reasonably concerned that if it allowed any part-time drivers, Metro would quickly shift to employ more of them at the expense of full-time workers, since part-time drivers are cheaper in terms of benefits and easier to schedule. So, the union is not likely to accept part-time drivers into its ranks. 

While AFSCME drivers for TAPS would like the higher pay and better benefits system, many of them, including students, cannot work full-time and would lose their jobs in a merger of the two systems. 

As a result, there is significant resistance from both employee groups to a merger of the systems, even though TAPS would benefit financially from such a merger. Yes, TAPS would have to pay higher wage and benefit costs, but it would also have access to the local, state and federal subsidies for transportation currently available to Metro. That is a big deal. 

TAPS is not capable of providing adequate transit services without cooperation with the Metro system. UCSC has a service agreement with Metro that provides about $4.8 million/year, funded by UCSC student fees to support the provision of Metro service to the UCSC campus and fare free ridership throughout the county. Students voted on the fees in 2019. UCSC is also in discussions with Metro about service improvements over the next few years.

So the two systems are doing the best they can under current circumstances to cooperate in providing high-quality and improved transit services to UCSC students. 

If there ever is going to be a merger between the two transit systems, it might look something like the Metro running all of the bus service on the major loop around campus, and TAPS continuing to operate cross-campus routes, shuttle services and special services such as the TAPS buses that run from the main campus to the coastal science campus, Safeway and other destinations. This would at least allow some of the part-time work for drivers currently provided by TAPS to continue, along with representation of those drivers by AFSCME.

But it is unlikely that such a system could be created without a major union struggle between AFSCME and the UCSC campus administration. 

The details will matter here. Merger possibilities are now even more fraught with the announcement that Metro CEO Michael Tree is leaving the agency to be closer to his aging parents in Bakersfield, so a new CEO would have to manage this difficult issue if a merger is going to be pursued. 

Beyond this, there is the issue of why nobody has challenged the provisions of the 1960 master plan. It’s definitely time to do that. 

It would take political action by the state legislature and the governor. Right now, however, I don’t see any group interested in leading that charge, which is too bad. 

If our state wants to provide higher education for its youth, and especially its disadvantaged youth – and it should – it also should be prepared to help bear the costs of educating them, and that certainly should include at least some of the costs of providing students with a modern, effective and safe transportation system.

FOR THE RECORD: This story has been updated to reflect that UCSC students have not driven TAPS buses in at least a decade and to clarify the source of the $4.8 million service agreement between UCSC and Metro.