April 30, 2009
Now there’s a ‘U-PASS lite’ for walkers, bikers
UPDATE (Oct. 3, 2023): Hall Health no longer provides bike safety equipment. The ASUW Bike Shop sells gear, while the U Bike program provides equipment for rent.
If you typically walk or bike to work, you may not have thought it important to have a U-PASS. On the other hand, there are those rare times when you need to park or ride the bus and you wish you could do that without paying the full freight.
UW Transportation Services is currently piloting a program for people like you. They’re calling it the U-Powered U-PASS, and it gives you the ability to bus or park at a discounted rate on those rare occasions when you need to. For $40 a year, participants get two coupons allowing them to park for $3 a day (just under the rate of U-PASS commuter tickets) and two round-trip bus tickets for King County Metro per quarter, plus all the merchant discounts available to U-PASS holders.
For the pilot program, which runs through spring and summer quarter, Transportation Services reached out to people who have participated in the Walk In and Ride in the Rain programs, inviting them to participate for $20. However, the pilot is open to all faculty and staff.
Ninety people are currently enrolled in the pilot program. The full program will be open to everyone in the fall. “This will be an annual membership, with the $40 fee running from September to September,” said Elena Fox, public information specialist for Transportation Services.
The program has been in the works for several years, Fox said. “People have long approached us at events and said, ‘I walk, I ride my bike almost all the time. Why am I going to buy that [the U-Pass] just to get a few discounts?’ On the other hand, they did want to be recognized in some way for choosing a green commuting option. They wanted, for example, to be able to buy bike helmets and lights at a discount from Hall Health, as U-PASS holders can do.”
In response, Transportation Services started developing something they called the Green U-PASS, and they did a survey asking, “If you were to purchase a product that wasn’t a full U-PASS, what things would be most important to you?” And the answers came back: bus tickets, discounted parking, merchant discounts.
For a variety of reasons that program didn’t come to fruition, but when Josh Kavanagh was hired as director of Transportation Services in 2007, Fox approached him with the idea, and he immediately decided to move the project back onto the front burner.
That’s when Celeste Gilman, the transportation systems manager, came into the picture to make the program happen. She said the pilot is designed to gather information to optimize the program. “We’re seeking input from the people who do choose to participate as well as those who don’t,” she said. “We want something that is of value for our walkers and bikers, so we want to hear from them. We’ll figure out something that works for us and for them.”
Those who sign up for the pilot program are asked to answer a few questions, and at the end of the pilot there will be a survey. But anyone who would like to can submit their ideas at http://www.washington.edu/commuterservices/cms/upowered/comment.
Over time, Fox and Gilman are hoping that bikers and walkers at the University will become more of a community. “We want them to have more of a voice and be an identified group that we can reach out to and they can reach out to us,” Gilman said. “We want to have an ongoing dialogue about how we can support their needs.”
To make that more likely, they’re working on additional Web tools to facilitate interaction — a place where people could, for example, find a buddy to walk or ride with.
And eventually, there might be a more formal result. There used to be a Bicycle Advisory Committee on campus, Fox pointed out, but that group no longer exists. She hopes that in the future the walking and biking community will unite and a new advisory committee will be born.
In the meantime, walkers and bikers can try out the UPowered U-PASS. For further information, go to http://www.washington.edu/commuterservices/cms/upowered.
