San Jose State University Associated Students Transportation Solutions is quietly phasing out the Clipper BayPass pilot program. They never shared the results of the program nor explaining why it’s being discontinued. Information on the website about the BayPass program have since been removed. They clearly show no interest about a program that can save students thousands of dollars and also encourage them to take transit. The Clipper cards SJSU issues is called the SmartPasss which is for VTA only. Students including myself ride Caltrain from Mountain View, Palo Alto, or even coming from the Peninsula and San Francisco. There are even students that ride BART to go to school which benefit from the program.

If San Jose State University can restart the program, many students can save thousands of dollars on Caltrain fares and BART fares. It may even encourage students to ride transit to San Francisco during school breaks using their BayPass Clipper card and then riding on Muni. It creates more of an incentive to ride transit instead of driving if an all region pass is available to enrolled students for free. Nearby San Francisco State University has made the BayPass permanent for all students, but San Jose State University refuses to do so. San Jose Sate Univerity is a large commuter school where many students taken transit and not all take only VTA Bus or VTA Light Rail to go to school.

Clipper 2.0 is about to launch soon which will have open payments for regular adult fares in all agencies and free transfer for both open payment and all Clipper card users not using a single agency pass. Since SmartPass is a single agency pass, students transferring to Caltrain wont get free transfers to and from VTA and will have to pay full fare for Caltrain. This makes it frustrating to students using SmartPass when transferring to other agencies as they have to pay more than those using open payment or regular Clipper cards. The BayPass is necessary to encourage students to ride transit and save their money since college is already very expensive. Please restart the Clipper BayPass program and make it permanent and available to all students by converting all SmartPass Clipper to BayPass Clipper as it will save many students thousands of dollars.