In early April, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Board of Directors approved incommodious service cuts and fare hikes, effective July 1. The 23 percent fare increase and host of service reductions are part of the MBTA’s proposal to reduce its $185 million budget deficit for Fiscal Year 2013.
Though weekend E branch survived this round of cuts, the fare increase – CharlieCard bus fares will increase from $1.25 to $1.50, and subway fares from $1.70 to $2.00 – will be enough of an inconvenience for students. And since the above-ground platforms characteristic of our stretch of Huntington Avenue don’t include pay stations, students without charged CharlieCards will often need to pay the higher ticket fare, — soon to be $2.50 for subway and $2 for busses.
Fortunately or unfortunately, what may seem like a small raise in price to some means many students will take to the streets, biking, walking, skateboarding, or creating other inventive modes of transportation. Though more exercise in the age of a rampant obesity epidemic might be considered a positive consequence of the hikes, the already-crowded Huntington Avenue certainly doesn’t need the influx of penniless students to exacerbate its geographical and safety inefficiencies. The situation is aggravated for students already trying to save money living off (and sometimes far from) campus.
Besides draining our pockets, service cuts inconvenience the co-op-bound population of the student body, many of whom use commuter rail services to reach workplaces in the Greater Boston area. Perhaps students will be inhibited from opting for positions they fear will either be too expensive to reach, or not worth the longer commute with less-frequent trains.
Northeastern’s 11 percent discount on monthly T passes tempers the sting slightly, but students who don’t ride often enough (twice daily) to require a pass are left unaided.
The university needs to address this issue. Whether it be in the form of subsidizing student CharlieCard fares, or making other options such as the library shuttle service more available and known, the university should sympathize with its penny-pinching students it already burdens with tuition.
This issue isn’t going to go away. If anything, it will probably get worse, and the plight of students will be muffled by the overburdening debt of a system ridden with inefficiency.
So just because the final cuts were not as severe as earlier proposals, we still have good reason to be agitated.
“Despite the fact that this current proposal is not as drastic [as the first two announced in January], and a lot of it is reasonable, it still doesn’t make me happy, necessarily,” Justin Bensan, a middler political science major and leader of the Northeastern branch of Students Against T Cuts told The News in April after the cuts were announced.
“As much as we were successful in terms of a Northeastern point of view, and that the E [branch] is saved for us, the cuts aren’t as severe for us, [and] a lot of the commuter rail service has been preserved, I don’t think that is any reason for Northeastern students to say, ‘OK, that’s fine now,’” Bensan said.
