Guest opinion: Making the PennPass affordable

Last weekend, I rode SEPTA out to Swarthmore with a friend of mine who has been a longtime resident of the city. As I reached into my pocket to produce my ticket for the conductor, my friend took out his monthly pass.

I was a bit jealous of him. He didn't have to worry about finding a place to buy tokens or an attendant to buy regional rail tickets from when the machines at 30th Street Station don't work right. On the other hand, he uses the regional rail a lot more than I do, which justifies him spending $70 a month for unlimited rides around the city during the week and across the entire system on weekends.

Then again, I use the system a lot when classes are in session, and so do many of my friends. So I once again started asking myself whether I should buy the PennPass, a joint effort between Penn and SEPTA that gives unlimited rides within the city and to nearby regional rail stations for $250 per semester.

Yet I quickly came to the same conclusion that I have come to every time I have considered buying the PennPass -- there is no way I will spend that much money in a semester on transit. But if the pass was cheaper, I'd buy it in a heartbeat, and a lot of other students probably would too.

Similar programs exist at schools in other big cities such as Seattle, Chicago and Boston, and all are more reasonably priced. It's time for Penn and SEPTA to follow suit and cut the cost of the PennPass.

The logic in setting the price of the PennPass at $250 is that it costs 10.7 percent less than the $280 cost of buying four monthly passes. But that logic is considerably flawed. First of all, the semester lasts 15 weeks instead of 16. The real value of a December pass is therefore only $52.50. So the real cost savings between a PennPass and four monthly passes is only $12.50, which barely makes the program worthwhile.

Secondly, and most importantly, the average weekly value of the PennPass when using the 15-week formula is $16.67. That's a lot more than the $13 it would cost to take five round-trips on the subway each week using tokens. Multiply that by 15 weeks and you get $203.13, which is almost 20 percent less than the PennPass costs. Even with a few regional rail rides per semester it is very difficult to spend $250.

The pass would be a far better value if its cost were lowered to at most $200, which as I showed above would more accurately reflect students who use the system frequently. I also bet that more students would buy it if the price were lowered, and that SEPTA would get more revenue from Penn as a result.

However, SEPTA's budget problems would almost surely prevent the agency from bearing the cost of doing this. So it falls to Penn, and specifically President Amy Gutmann, to show some leadership and spend the money to bring the cost of the PennPass down.

If the cost of the pass were lowered by $50 and 1,000 students decided to buy the pass as a result, Penn's expense would total $50,000 -- the equivalent of one and one-quarter tuitions. For Penn, it's the equivalent of reaching under the couch for spare change.

So naturally, I doubt that anything will happen. My cynicism stems not from the fact that Penn would claim it has better ways to spend that paltry sum, but from Gutmann's complete silence on the many issues SEPTA has faced in recent months.

Gutmann has an enormous stake in Philadelphia's public transit system. It is how thousands of workers at Penn, the city's largest private employer, get to work, and it is how Penn students get out into the city to spend their discretionary money on food, drinks, and everything else that Philadelphia has to offer. The city's tax base benefits as well, as do those who profit from it. Still, there has been nothing but silence from Gutmann or her office.

Nonetheless, the deadline for buying the pass is still well over a month away, so there's still plenty of time to make the change before the fall semester. At the very least, it's time for Gutmann to speak up about the issue, and to play the role that is required of her as Penn's president.

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