Clark County youth will have a big incentive to ride the bus this year.
The C-Tran Board of Directors unanimously approved an expansion and extension of the Youth Opportunity Pass pilot program on Tuesday. This school year, C-Tran will offer 3,000 bus passes valid for 12 months to at-need students in most school districts within Clark County.
Last school year’s pilot ran in the Vancouver and Evergreen school districts. This year it is expanding to include the Camas, Washougal and Battle Ground school districts.
Ridgefield and La Center schools were not included in the program because C-Tran has limited service in those areas.
According to C-Tran documents, the agency’s staff will create agreements with interested districts when school offices reopen this month.
The original proposal presented by C-Tran staff on Tuesday night called for 2,000 passes valid for nine months.
“It just seems like … when school’s out and these passes go away, we’re taking away a great opportunity for kids that maybe have summer jobs,” said Ridgefield City Councilor John Main during a discussion about whether to expand the program.
C-Tran staff estimated the original proposal of 2,000 passes for nine months to be valued at $616,000.
However, Scott Patterson, C-Tran’s director of development and public affairs, cautioned not to infer that figure is lost revenue for C-Tran, because that would assume every one of those passes would be sold if the transit agency weren’t giving them away.
“We know that’s not the case,” he said. “We tried to estimate what a better number may be, and what we’ve come up with is probably about a $10,000 revenue impact.”
The student passes will allow unlimited travel within the transit agency’s C-Zone, which covers most of Clark County, and access to local community centers during nonschool times. A student pass for the zone typically costs $30 per month. The youth passes aren’t valid on the express buses that travel to downtown Portland, or on TriMet.
As it was last year, students will be given a pass on a need basis, partially determined by the students’ eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch. Nearly half of the students in the Vancouver and Evergreen districts meet that threshold.
The passes come in the form of a sticker placed on a student’s school ID.
Clark County council Chair Marc Boldt said he wanted to see if the program is creating future public transit users.
“That would be the goal, I think, of the board is this will make adult riders, and they will pay their fair share in the next so many years,” he said.
Patterson said the limited number of students that were surveyed last year said they would.
Last school year, the Youth Opportunity Pass program ran as a one-year pilot between C-Tran, the city of Vancouver and the Vancouver and Evergreen school districts to give free public transportation to up to 1,500 students in need.
The program started late. Passes weren’t handed out until November, rather than at the start of the school year.
Also, the 23 participating schools only gave out 544 passes. C-Tran hoped to gather information about the students’ experiences, but only 55 students returned surveys.
Vancouver City Councilor Jack Burkman urged C-Tran staff to work with the school districts to ensure the passes are better distributed.
