UPass Access

Today Mark Coffin, VP Education, and myself attended a meeting with members of Dalhousie University, Halifax Regional Municipality, and Metro Transit.

Several issues were discusses such as possible ways to have more people riding public transportation, the need for more money for Metro Transit to add services (this could come from a number of sources), route enhancements, having a report on service enhancement for our students, and the stickers.

Curerntly Metro Transit is waiting to add more to their service due to money and space constraints. MT needs more money so that it can add services and also sustain them over time. It is easy to say that money can just come from more people using the service but there are many other costs that cannot be covered from just the fare money. The space constraints are related to bus storage spaces. They are waiting for a new facility to be built which will allow them to store more of their buses and then they are looking to see if they will be add more.

Halifax students that are part of the UPass system are currently contributing approximatley $1.5 million to Metro Transit. We are now looking to receive reports from Metro Transit on a regular basis that will show the service enhancements that are being made.

But the most immediate piece of information that I have to pass along to our students is that the UPass sticker that was placed on your Dalcard in September is most likely going to fall off. There have been numerous issues with the first sticker that was placed on and the University has acted quickly to fix this via a new improved sticker. If your sticker has fallen off please visit the Dalcard office, Student Services (Killam Library), or Student Accounts and they can place a new and improved sticker onto your Dalcard.