The two most important things regarding providing transport from the dorm to Baruch is cost and convincing non-dorm students that it’s worth it.
Cost:
Using Shuttle Bus: Buses generally get 4-9 MPG (http://www.limo.org/Upload/Operator-Need-To-Know/Need%20To%20Know%20Buy%20Bus.pdf), and there are 240 Baruch students living in the dorms (http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/studentaffairs/housing/index.html). Baruch is about 3.5 miles away from the dorms, so that’s 7 miles in one day if we assume the shuttle bus will take students to Baruch and back. Taking the midpoint of that MPG range (6.5) we get that it would require 1.07 gallons every day per bus. Buses can carry around 40 people, so 6 buses would be required a day, which means 6.42 gallons of gas a day would be used on this. Gas prices vary depending on where you’re getting your gas from/it just generally fluctuates but it goes for about 4 dollars a gallon on average. This means that’s $25.68 a day. There are about 20 school days a month, but we have around a third of December off. So that’s 73 days a term, which means the total cost would be 73*25.68 = $1874.64 per term. So around $3750 a year.
However people have varying class start times and end times, so a bus would have to come before the earliest possible class and after the latest possible class, which would make this system almost entirely useless. Therefore, you would have to split it apart into 3 different trips at different times in the morning, and three trips back in the afternoon/evening to try to account for everyone. This multiplies the cost by three to $11250 per term, which means 22,500 a year.
Of course this does not account for the cost of buying 6 shuttle buses, mainteinance , insurance and the cost of a driver. A bus driver costs 15/hr, and would drive for 6 hours a day most likely, so that’s 90 dollars a day and 90*73 is 6570 a term. 13140 a year.
Insurance is 342 a month,so that’s 4104 a year.
I couldn’t find costs for mainteinance and the actual buses – so more research needs to be done on this, but right now the total cost would of a shuttle bus would be 39744.
Insurance and driver source;http://www.limo.org/Upload/Operator-Need-To-Know/Need%20To%20Know%20Buy%20Bus.pdf
Providing Student Metrocards: High schools often provide student metrocards. There are 550,000 students who use these, and it costs the MTA about 161,500,000 a year to provide this (http://secondavenuesagas.com/2009/12/14/to-save-money-mta-may-axe-student-metrocards/). For high school students 90 million dollars is covered by the city and state but we can assume they won’t be eager to cover the cost for Baruch students. Student metrocards have 3 rides a day on them, but Baruch students would only need 2 a day. So we can cut the cost by 1/3 to $108,205,000. If we do $108,205,000/550,000 we get 196 dollars a year per student. Multiply this by 240, and you get 47000 for the total cost to Baruch.
However what if we just provide regular metrocards? There are fewer school days in a college school year than a high school one. So with 150 days in a full school year, 240 students and 5 dollars a day for back and forth transit, we get 187,500. From this you can see that the regular metrocards have an actual margin, while student metrocards would be provided at cost. This makes me feel that the MTA would be unlikely to do that. Give these two stats, I think the shuttle bus would be the better option
Non-Dorm Students
I don’t see non-dorm students being willing to accept this unless the cost was shifted onto the dormers. For the shuttle bus that would add 39744/240 = $165.6 per year to each student (if you have 6 total bus rides a day), which is an inconsequential cost given that the cost of campus room and board costs 14672 right now. (https://www.cappex.com/colleges/CUNY-Bernard-M-Baruch-College/tuition-and-costs). Providing student metrocards would cost slightly more (but is unlikely that the MTA would be willing to agree to this since they’re already losing money on student metrocards) while providing regular metrocards preloaded with 5 dollars a day would cost over four times as much.
Overall, unless I messed up on my math, it would not be too expensive for the dormers, so a shuttle bus is feasible. I am unsure when the earliest and latest Baruch classes are, so more than 6 bus trips a day might be needed. Even if we doubled it to $330 (assuming twice as many bus trips), and then rounded that cost up to 400 to account for inefficiencies that cost is still inconsequential compared to the current campus room and board cost.