By Samantha Cohen

Only a Metro ride away from the University of Maryland’s campus is Washington, D.C., where many students take advantage of various job and internship opportunities. Some students find it inconvenient to pay for their MetroCards each way, while others do not mind the small fee. 

According to the UMD Department of Transportation Services (DOTS), The Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (WMATA) operates the Metro U-Pass program, allowing students at participating colleges access to unlimited Metrorail and Metrobus rides. 

There are currently 38 colleges across the country participating in U-Pass, and UMD is not one of them, according to the WMATA website. 

“While the program can be a great benefit to regular users of public transportation, there is a substantial cost associated with it,” a DOTS spokesperson told SBS. “To participate in Metro U-pass, WMATA requires that universities enroll every member of their student body in the program.”

DOTS said that they do not have data on the number of students who commute via Metro. Many students travel to and from campus in several other ways.

“At this time, the benefits of participating in Metro U-Pass for some students would not justify the significant cost of enrolling the entire student body,” DOTS said. 

The cost of this program would likely use mandatory student fees, without allowing students to opt out if they do not frequently use the Metro, DOTS said.

Olivia Goff, a junior economics and business analytics double major, commutes to D.C. three times a week for her internship with a government consulting and lobbying firm.

Goff’s commute costs $5.20 each way since she has to transfer Metro lines. Goff said through the university’s Department of Economics, she received a scholarship to cover the cost of her metro fare.

“[Free Metro fares] would be an incredible opportunity. I think people would go into D.C. a lot more, and they’d take advantage of a lot more opportunities, like internships, if that fare was covered for them,” Goff said. 

Other students, including sophomore journalism major Andy Parr, commute to D.C. for jobs. 

Parr works on the game night staff for the Washington Capitals three days a week, which requires him to be in D.C. two and a half hours before the puck drops at 7:30 p.m. He said he does not find it necessarily inconvenient to pay for his MetroCard when he commutes home. 

“We have one of the nicest public transit networks in the country, and if people don’t pay for it, the reliability of it would just go downhill real fast, in my opinion. So to pay $6.50 to go from College Park to Fairfax on my longest trip, like that’s just a deal, if you ask me, and then going downtown is, like, a little over four bucks,” Parr said. 

The Metro is a convenient way for Parr to get home to Northern Virginia since having a car on campus is too expensive, he said. He would rather sit on the train for a little over an hour than sit in traffic on the beltway for two. 

Parr said that UMD should explore a program giving students a discount where they would be paying less than if they paid for each individual Metro ride. 

“There are a ton of people here who do internships or jobs in the district, so I’m sure they wouldn’t have a problem selling them,” Parr said. “It would just be more of a matter of getting the city to agree to it, and if they’re able to reach a deal that would mathematically make sense, I don’t see why people wouldn’t want to go for that.”

Featured image: College Park-U of Md Metro Station. Photo by Anika Stikeleather, Oct. 15, 2024