OH: Cleveland State ends U-Pass program; Students face $95 cost for monthly RTA passes

Cleveland State University students will soon be on their own to pay for RTA bus and Rapid passes – no longer getting them from the school as part of their regular fees and tuition.

A spokesman for the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority said CSU informed the agency of its decision on Wednesday.

The change means that students wanting to continue with unlimited passes will have to pay the regular price of $95 a month. This would amount to hundreds of dollars over the course of a semester.

CSU for at least 20 years has been part of the RTA’s U-Pass program, in which a flat student fee was charged by the school to all students – regardless of whether they used RTA – in exchange for offering passes to everyone.

Most recently, this fee was $57.50 per semester for every student taking at least one credit hour, according to an archived version of the school’s U-Pass webpage from the spring.

A group called Clevelanders for Public Transit said students had reached out with concerns about the change. The organization launched a “restore the U-Pass” website.

Cleveland.com has reached out to CSU. It was unclear Wednesday if student fees would be reduced as part of the change.

Under former RTA General Manager Joe Calabrese, the U-Pass program was an initiative to spur ridership while being close to cost neutral for the agency.

The per-student fees were originally determined, in part, by projecting how much students as a whole were already paying to ride RTA. If students rode more often because of the pass, that increased ridership was considered a positive outcome.

RTA said Wednesday it generated about $1.4 million a year under the program.

RTA spokesman Robert Fleig said the agency is working with CSU to arrange for the school to be able to sell to students daily, weekly or monthly passes at regular prices.

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