Page One

After 16 years of selling transit passes and helping locals navigate the Bay Area’s complicated web of trains and buses, the Berkeley Transit Rideshare and Parking shop, better known as Berkeley TRiP, closed its doors Friday. 

Local transit advocates said the demise of the combination ticket store and advocacy organization, jointly operated by the city and UC Berkeley, is a blow to public transit in the East Bay and beyond. 

“Berkeley TRiP was actually a national model in how a city, in this case a city and university, could really try to make alternative transportation use more accessible to the public,” said Stuart Cohen, executive director of the Oakland-based Transportation and Land Use Coalition. “It’s setting a very unfortunate precedent now in shutting down during tough financial times.” 

The decision to pull the plug came from UC Berkeley, which will likely take tens of millions of dollars in cuts when the state Legislature, deadlocked in budget talks, finally addresses its $38 billion deficit. 

UC Berkeley Director of Transportation Nadeson Permaul said the university could not continue to pay for about 65 percent of TRiP’s $350,000 annual budget when only 18 percent of the people who buy passes or seek transit information at the Center Street store are affiliated with the university. 

UC Berkeley, he said, must focus its public transportation dollars squarely on faculty, students and staff. 

“I don’t think it’s appropriate for the university to be neglecting, in some sense, its own constituency,” said Permaul. 

City officials dispute the university’s budget figures. They say Berkeley’s contribution of a rent-free building and utilities payments mean the city and the university have split the cost of the TRiP store evenly.  

City Councilmember Dona Spring argues that UC Berkeley should maintain its commitment to public transit given that its students and employees contribute heavily to the city’s traffic problems. 

“[Closing TRiP] was a real disappointing blow,” Spring said. “The university has just decided it wants to do its own thing.”  

Starting this week, UC Berkeley is offering passes and travel advice to faculty, students and staff at its main parking and transportation office at 2150 Kittredge St., downtown. Former TRiP employees will work at the downtown office.  

So far, the city has not made alternative arrangements for members of the public. But Mayor Tom Bates said he is negotiating with the Berkeley Convention & Visitors Bureau, located next door to the TRiP office, about opening a new shop. 

Berkeley transportation planner Cherry Chaichara said several other options are also on the table. The city has had preliminary discussions with the nonprofit Bicycle-Friendly Berkeley Coalition about setting up a TRiP-like store at the organization’s bike station at the downtown Berkeley BART station. The station currently provides free protection for train passengers’ bikes. 

Chaichara added that one of the two companies bidding for management of the city-owned Center Street parking garage has expressed interest in selling transit passes on site.  

The city and university are also talking about re-establishing their partnership at some point, albeit in a different form. Permaul said the two sides may work together to deliver passes to the public cheaply through the Internet or vending machines.  

Last week, with no alternative yet in place, Berkeley TRiP directed customers to a range of local businesses that sell public transit passes, from the Ecology Center Bookstore on San Pablo Avenue to Try Us Bail Bonds on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

Felix Brenner, a lawyer at the Berkeley firm of Duane & Seltzer on Center Street, said Friday that he purchases $122 in two-week transit passes at Berkeley TRiP every month. 

“I will miss it,” he said outside the shop, which was covered in orange and green signs announcing its closure. “I’ll have to track down my BART-plus ticket somewhere else, and I’m not sure where yet.” 

Office manager Carolina Vasquez, who arrived in May to shut down the program, said the elderly may have the most difficult time with TRiP’s demise. 

“The people who will really be hurt are the seniors, because they are used to going to one place,” she said, adding that language barriers have made it difficult for staff to tell some customers where they can go to get passes in the future. 

Berkeley TRiP was born in 1987 when the city, the university and three transit agencies—BART, AC Transit and Caltrans—set up the organization to promote public transportation. For years, the group combined ticket sales with advocacy, dropping off passes at senior centers and meeting with local businesses to encourage large-scale transit pass plans for employees. 

Cohen said the program was a model for similar efforts in places like Santa Clara County and Boulder, Colo. 

But Permaul said the advocacy work waned in recent years as growing ticket sales occupied more and more staff time. In the meantime, he said, Berkeley TRiP’s financial woes ballooned as the transit agencies pulled out of the program and the city, until two years ago, maintained flat funding for the shop.