In the future, CyRide may be free for all riders, not just students.

At a recent budget hearing, Sheri Kyras, CyRide director of transportation, gave a rough outline of how this idea would be implemented.

“This has been a recent goal of City Council’s,” she said. “We started looking for ways to help pay for this, and we came across a potential grant that would help us pay for a demonstration program.”

The grant Kyras referred to comes from the Iowa Power Fund, which was established by the Office of Energy Independence. This grant would help pay for a demonstration program which would help show how popular the program would be.

“Unfortunately, we don’t know how much the grant will be yet,” Kyras said. “We just found it and are just starting to figure out how much we will need.”

Kyras and CyRide are also trying to figure out how much ridership will increase and whether CyRide will have to hire more drivers and get more buses.

“We’re going to be crunching a lot of numbers,” Kyras said.

Kyras said their research should be done in time to present to the CyRide Board of Trustees on Feb. 20.

CyRide will also be looking at other transit systems that have switched to a fare-free system to see how many additional riders they received.

“It looks like the systems that have done this saw an 18-to-20 percent increase in ridership,” Kyras said. “However, we are already partially fare-free, so we’re trying to gauge the impact that will have.”

The current program has already seen a rise in student ridership in the last few years, mostly due to more marketing.

“Student ridership has increased dramatically lately,” said Maggie Luttrell, senior in history and ex-officio city council liaison. “The increase in marketing is why more students are riding and the buses are packed.”

The main question, though, is about money. Right now, CyRide is paid for by city administration, ISU administration and student fee money through GSB.

“The only figure we know now is that we can have the fund cover the entire program, which would last us three years,” Kyras said. “But it’s really too early to tell much more.”

Luttrell was told only one thing about funding.

“All I know is that they said they weren’t going to increase the amount that GSB pays,” she said.

Dan Rice, city councilman, said that, in terms of money, the program has one obvious goal.

“You have the money that the fare box brings in now, so let’s start with covering that,” he said.

According to Kyras’ presentation to the city council at the Feb. 4 budget hearing, CyRide’s annual fare receipts, which would need to be made up for by the grant, are $270,000. It may be possible to have the grant cover costs for three years, after which the current funding sources would have to pick up the slack – and, if ridership does increase under the fare-free program, operating costs will likely be higher. Beyond that, though, Rice is optimistic.

“I do think this program is a fairly positive goal,” he said. “But without knowing numbers, it’s hard to say what definite impact this will have.”