Public Transportation: A Lifeline for Students

How BATA helps students with mobility, employment, and education

Editor's Note: This is a student journalism piece from our 2026 Voices of the Next Generation issue.

Every Saturday, students from Interlochen Arts Academy take the bus to Traverse City.

The commute is about 45 minutes, past farms and lake-view subdivisions and the occasional gas station. But for me and many of my classmates, it’s the only reliable way off campus. The bus shows up, and we go.

The Bay Area Transportation Authority (BATA) serves Grand Traverse and Leelanau counties, operating 14 fixed routes that connect students to schools, workplaces, and daily necessities across the region. For many young riders, this transit system is the catalyst for their independence.

Serving Students

The scale of BATA’s student reach is larger than many people realize.

“We currently provide transportation to almost every school in the area,” says Chris Davis, BATA’s interim executive director, listing Woodland School, Grand Traverse Academy, Glen Lake, Traverse City High School, Leland, and several Montessori programs, among others. “Out of our 14 fixed routes, 10 of them go to student campuses. We are providing transportation at BATA to students to get to their shopping, to school, to their work.”

According to Davis, approximately one third of BATA’s riders are students, one third are senior citizens, and one third are general ridership, reflecting the broad scope of the system’s impact on daily life across different generations.

Northwestern Michigan College sits directly on the Bay Line route. Traverse City Area Public Schools funded roughly 1,500 student passes in a single fall semester. Weekend service carries students to part-time jobs and activities outside the school week.

For students at boarding schools like Interlochen Arts Academy, where the vast majority don’t have cars or licenses, that Saturday route into Traverse City is especially important. Alexandra Workman, a student at Interlochen Arts Academy, describes what opportunities it provides for her.

“It’s really nice because, on Saturdays when I’m free with my friends, it’s good to get away from campus and explore downtown Traverse City,” she says. “It literally enables me to kind of get a break from campus and get a little taste of freedom.”

Transportation and the Workforce

Transit is particularly important to students because it helps them to gain access to the workforce.

For teenagers and young adults who want to work, transportation is often a prerequisite. A job offer is only viable when it can be reached and reliably commuted to. In a region where many students don’t drive, the bus route between where they live and where they work is, in practical terms, the employment pipeline.

Carolyn Ulstad, transportation program manager at the Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities, talks about the impacts of student mobility.

She remarks that “If you don’t have a car on campus, whether you’re an international student or not, it can make life feel very isolating, where you can’t really travel outside of your little circle.”

That isolation, she argues, has downstream effects. Limiting where students can go in turn restricts what they can pursue.

“If students can access public transportation in this way, then they have more access to jobs, employment, or just higher education,” Ulstad says. “It could just expand even the possibilities.”

Public Transport Is Becoming More Important

Fewer teenagers are getting their driver’s licenses at 16 than in previous generations. Researchers point to a mix of factors, including cost and shifting cultural attitudes around car ownership.

Ulstad observes that “owning a vehicle might just not be in the picture because of the expense.” She adds that “insurance, fueling it up, doing all those things—especially when you’re a young adult, a student—you’re probably on a limited budget.”

Transit, she argues, is one path toward financial stability for young people who might otherwise drain limited resources on car ownership early in life.

“It can be a way that people can be more financially mobile. If they can utilize public transportation over owning a vehicle, you could save so much money. That can lead to better outcomes later in life.”

BATA structures its fares with affordability in mind. Students ride at half price, and an annual pass covering unlimited fixed-route travel costs $322, a fraction of what car ownership typically demands.

Expecting Consistency and Accessibility

Davis emphasizes that consistency is something BATA takes seriously.

“A lot of students that go there [Interlochen] do not have vehicles, and so they depend on us,” she states. “We’re very careful to not cancel transportation.”

For a system that students rely on daily, reliability is equally as important as reach. Davis points to this winter as evidence. Despite persistent severe weather across the region, service has barely paused.

“Our buses are very reliable with this inclement weather. We have not had to shut down and not provide service one day in this whole winter,” she says. “We’re not going to cancel, and we’re going to get them there safely.”

Accessibility is also built into the system. All BATA buses are equipped with wheelchair lifts, and drivers are trained to assist riders with disabilities.

“If a student is in a wheelchair, for example, they can take their wheelchair and our bus driver would help them get the wheelchair on a lift and into the bus so that they can be transported to work, grocery shopping, school—wherever they need to go,” Davis asserts.

Growth Requires Support

BATA’s current footprint, though, reflects the limits of what a transit agency can sustain without adequate support.

Funding is the most persistent barrier. Rural systems cover large service areas with relatively low population density, a structural challenge that makes expansion expensive and difficult to justify on ridership numbers alone.

“The biggest barrier is money,” Ulstad states. “As a state, we need to do better at investing at a higher rate for our public transportation systems.”

She notes that the populations who depend most on transit have more in common than they might appear. The system serves a large share of the region’s population that may not have another option.

“The needs of youth and our young adults are actually really similar; the wants and desires are kind of the same wants and desires as our seniors,” Ulstad remarks. “It just seems to be there a little bit more.”

At the operational level, BATA also faces challenges when hiring. Drivers require commercial licenses and passenger endorsements—which are credentials that take time and money to obtain and that limit the hiring pool.

“We continue to be recruiting for bus drivers,” Davis says. “We will continue to do that so that we can expand services—not just maintain the services that we have, but we’re always looking to add services.”

For the students who depend on BATA, a healthy transit system can signal long-term impacts like the ability to work or attend school, which ultimately benefits local communities as a whole.

As Davis puts it: “This might help other students who didn’t realize they can be helped to get to college, or to their school, or give them independence.”

That is a modest way to describe something that, for a lot of students, makes quite a lot possible.

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