Students without a Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit, or TCAT, pass who were previously able to take advantage of 24/7 free rides due to technical difficulties with TCAT’s fare system will no longer be able to do so.
This change impacts nearly all students besides first-year students — including freshman and transfer students — who are given a free OmniRide bus pass that can be used anytime during the day and week. Students were not notified prior to this change.
Students without bus passes started being denied when swiping on buses in mid-October, after months of free access.
Without OmniRide bus passes, students can ride for free after 6 p.m. on weekdays and all hours on weekends, as a service covered by Cornell, according to TCAT general manager Matthew Rosenbloom-Jones. If student IDs are rejected during these periods, drivers have been instructed to override the farebox and let students on at no charge.
Switching bus fare systems caused a compatibility issue with students’ Cornell IDs earlier this year, prompting the University’s Transportation Services Office to allow all students to ride for free mid-way through the Spring 2024 semester and into the Fall 2024 semester.
According to Rosenbloom-Jones, Cornell student IDs use magstripes that do not operate well with the modern farebox system due to “limited ways to communicate” with IDs, which causes cards without OmniRide privileges to be denied.
The issue with the fare system was fixed by TCAT by April 2024, according to the transportation office. However, according to Rosenbloom-Jones, Cornell did not update the list of students with access to the bus system until Oct. 16, meaning all students could ride for free at any time — a privilege that costs $200 annually.
This list includes students who have purchased passes or who have a free OmniRide pass. An updated list is sent to TCAT daily, according to Rosenbloom-Jones.
Amy Hinesley’s ’25 ID card was denied on Saturday, Oct. 26 — before TCAT told The Sun they established that ID rejection should be overridden during free periods — when she tried to take Route 32, which she has used frequently this semester to get to a lab.
“I tried to show [the driver] my student ID, since Cornell transportation has said that if you show that you’re a Cornell student, you can ride on the weekend,” Hinesley said. “I ended up buying a bus pass after the swiping access got taken away.”
Based on the statements provided by both involved offices, Hinesley should have been able to ride for free. However, the driver asked her to pay out of pocket for the trip but ended up letting students get on without paying due to the amount of cards being denied.
Several other students confirmed with The Sun that their cards were denied during free times.
When asked about student IDs being rejected during free periods, the transportation office told The Sun that TCAT will also now have signs on fareboxes stating that all students should be allowed on during the free periods.
Besides a statement on their website about the possibility of students having to pay the $1.50 in cash if their ID card is denied during free periods, the transportation office has not posted anything about the change in access for Cornell students, or the problems they may experience when swiping their IDs.
According to Rosenbloom-Jones, TCAT has seen a large increase in ridership over the 2023-2024 academic year — especially on bus routes associated with Cornell’s campus — aligning with when the technical issues with the farebox occurred and students could ride for free.
TCAT’s September ridership data shows that use of Route 81 — which runs through the campus on weekdays — increased by about 82 percent compared to this time last year. Route 30 — which goes back and forth between the Ithaca Commons and the Ithaca Mall, cutting straight through Central or West Campus — increased by about 112 percent.
For the past couple of years, Ithaca College has partnered with the local transit system to provide all of the college’s students, staff and faculty with free passes, extending this offer through the 2024-2025 academic year.
Rosenbloom-Jones explained that Ithaca College students use the TFare mobile app to access their free passes and that TCAT has recommended that Cornell use the same system.
“A more modern ID card or app-based system would eliminate the need for operators to manually ‘override’ the rejected IDs on nights and weekends, and we have had conversations with Cornell Parking & Transportation to use the same app-based solution that Ithaca College has utilized with great success,” Rosenbloom-Jones said.