By Paul TakahashiThe Daily Northwestern

ASG will begin polling students on HereAndNow this week to gauge student interest in the U-Pass, a card that allows students unlimited transportation on Chicago Transit Authority buses and trains.

“It’s been a theme throughout the past several years,” said Samir Pendse, one of the authors of the poll. “Every year, there’s an outcry, ‘Why don’t we have U-Passes at Northwestern?'”

The poll was debated extensively during last week’s Associated Student Government meeting for the first time this year. The cost of implementing the U-Pass was a concern among senators at the meeting.

“Generally, a lot of the funding would be a fee added to your quarterly bill,” said Pendse, a Weinberg freshman. “How much that will end up being, we have no idea.”

NU graduate students pay $56 per quarter for the U-Pass, according to the Graduate Leadership Council.

In 2004, ASG discussed the same issue and an online poll that gauged student interest concluded that about 72 percent of respondents opposed purchasing U-Passes.

ASG’s most recent U-Pass initiative began on the heels of a similar request by graduate students last year.

After graduate student groups lobbied the administration, U-Pass was implemented for graduate students this January.

“Overall, the administration was supportive of the idea if we could show enough student interest,” said Graduate Student Association President Ashi Savara, a chemistry graduate student. “It never would have happened without having a responsive administration.”

Savara said a poll was e-mailed to all graduate students last October. The results showed that 66 percent of the graduate students who responded to the poll said they would be willing to pay for the U-Pass, he said.

Some students complained the poll had a self-selection bias, and in response, the Graduate Leadership Council set up a committee to investigate student satisfaction rates with the U-Pass, he said. The committee will send graduate students another poll before summer, he said.

“Due to their tight budgets, graduate students are notoriously stingy,” Savara said. “Being forced to pay for something that some may not necessarily want gets them riled up.”

Part of the problem with offering U-Passes to undergraduates is CTA’s “all or nothing policy,” which prohibits students from opting out of the program, said Cate Whitcomb, assistant to the vice president for student affairs.

The new HereAndNow poll will be used to determine students’ current usage of CTA transportation, Pendse said, and to gauge whether undergraduates would be interested in paying for the U-Pass. Other questions on the poll will help ASG project future usage by students.

“You could hypothesize that people would try to get into Chicago for more events and maybe look at opportunities and even jobs there if there was easier transportation,” Pendse said. “We don’t know. That could be completely wrong, but that’s why we have the poll out.”

At last week’s ASG meeting, the transit poll was expanded to include more questions about the intercampus shuttle.

“The thing about the intercampus shuttle is that it goes to the Feinberg (School of Medicine) area downtown, but when people get there, they have to get on the El to get around Chicago,” Pendse said. “I think just expanding intercampus hours and service alone will not serve Northwestern’s transportation interests.”

Some students, such as Weinberg senior Paul Bryan, said the pass’s extra expense isn’t worth it.

“At most, I go downtown five or six times a quarter,” he said. “I don’t think it would be worth it. It just doesn’t make any fiscal sense.”

Pendse said the results of the poll may be used by the University Budget Priorities Committee to lobby for funding from the University Budget Committee in February.

The UBPC lists U-Passes among the 16 different programs on its own poll on HereAndNow, along with expanding on-campus wireless connectivity and increasing diversity.

Pendse said the results of the ASG Poll will be used to entice downtown Chicago businesses to subsidize part of the cost.

“The chances (of the subsidies) are slim,” Pendse said. “But we’re going to at least exhaust that opportunity and try to see what’s out there to give it our best shot.”

Reach Paul Takahashi at [email protected].