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Editor: 

I want to congratulate Jia-Rui Chong on her balanced article of February 28, 2002 ("Transportation, parking woes continue with rally on campus"). I have a clarification to make. At one point Ms. Chong writes that although the shuttle bus to the Rockridge BART Station "made a lot of locals happy, the shuttle did not achieve its goal and would have become too expensive." She attributes this comment to me. In fact what I explained to her was that the program, developed in conjunction with the City of Berkeley, AC Transit, LBNL and the Berkeley campus, was aimed at those who live in Contra Costa County and drive to the campus. The goal was to persuade them to use BART and take a convenient shuttle from Rockridge to the campus. That effort was wholly unsuccessful, attributed to the difficulty in finding parking at BART stations and the additional time added to the commute. The majority of those who were using the free access to AC Transit buses were not those who were drove regularly to the campus. AC Transit staff have said consistently that in order to have a class pass type program for employees, all 12,000 UC Berkeley staff would  

need to be enrolled just like the student program. Since such a program would be cost prohibitive and only meet the transit needs of a limited number of faculty and staff, the campus is looking at other alternatives. 

Nadesan Permaul 

Director of Transportation 

University of California, Berkeley