Students on the Guelph campus have benefited from a universal bus pass (UPass) for more than 30 years; it gives them unlimited access to Guelph Transit at a much lower cost. On-campus full-time and part-time students are billed for the bus pass as part of their compulsory fees each semester.     

In the past, students who were charged the bus pass fee would line up in person every semester to receive a bus pass sticker for their student ID card. They would need to show the sticker to the bus driver before getting on the bus. Managing the distribution of bus pass stickers was a largely manual and paper-based process, and it required significant staff time from the Central Student Association (CSA) and Graduate Students’ Association (GSA).    

Guelph Transit, the CSA, the GSA, Computing and Communications Services (CCS), Hospitality Services and the Office of Registrarial Services initiated a project in 2019 to modernize and simplify how students access city buses. Although the COVID-19 pandemic delayed implementation of the solution, the new process for accessing buses is expected to roll out in January 2022 – no more stickers! Students who have paid for the bus pass via their student fees will instead be able to tap their student ID card on the farebox on the bus.     

You may be asking, “how does the farebox determine if the student has paid for the bus pass?” The process involves multiple steps of data transfer and translation. In the first step, an automated data feed from Colleague provides a list of currently registered students who have been charged the bus pass fee. This feed is sent to Hospitality Services to translate it into student ID card data, and the resulting data is transferred to Guelph Transit. Guelph Transit requires only minimal ID card information to validate a card; personal student information is not shared.    

Following two successful pilots with over 140 participants, the team is looking forward to launching this new system in the Winter 2022 semester.