Students go green with commutes

By Christine Tran STAFF WRITER

A group of students at San Jose State are aiming to reduce the carbon footprint of the commuter school.

Isabella Harrison, Liam McInerney, Gabriel Woodson and Jayme Sinson are the members behind Green Machines.

Green Machines is a group that wants to reduce the carbon footprint from students and faculty commuting to and from campus by increasing public transportation ridership.

Environmental studies senior McInerney said he was inspired to share this resource with the general public through this project.

“I frequently take advantage of the clipper card myself and use almost exclusively public transport to get around San Jose,” McInerney said.

Harrison, a political science junior, said students can save money and time using services provided by Transportation Solutions, including a one time payment of three dollars for a clipper card.

Transportation Solutions is an eco-friendly transportation service partnered with the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority to “alleviate automobile traffic to SJSU and reduce the impact on the University’s parking facilities,” according to the SJSU webpage.

“[It] gives students more free time on the public transportation systems,” Harrison said.

“Students can do homework or even read a book – bonus: gas is expensive!”

Advertising junior Carolina Garcia works as a student assistant at Transportation Solutions inside the Student Union. Garcia said another resource that Transportation Solutions offers is a bike enclosure where SJSU students purchase a key to lock their bicycles during class.

“We try to make it, like, more comfortable for students to commute here with their bikes or like scooters, alternative transportation, instead of, like, using their own cars,” she said.

Garcia said commuter students should consider taking public transportation as opposed to driving their own vehicles to campus because of the financial benefits.

“Alternative transportation alleviates parking issues and congestion,” Garcia said. “In a way, it is cheaper because maintaining a car and, like, paying for insurance and the whole cost behind having a car is way higher than public transportation.”

A private vehicle releases 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency article.

Business marketing sophomore Asia Mathaw said she occasionally relies on public transportation to get to campus, which usually takes her around 15-20 minutes.

“I use the shuttle every now and then when I know there won’t be any parking,” Mathaw said.

Harrison said the group is passionate about this project because they understand that combating climate change, with the help of SJSU, is essential to the future of our society.

“We hope to do this by advertising different ways to cut down CO2 emissions that our school offers such as clipper cards and bike reimbursements,” Harrison said. “[It] not only helps the environment, but allows the student to fully utilize every incentive they are paying for in their tuition.”

Drugs

Continued from page 1 increased from 11 in 2018 to 132 in 2021, according to an Oct. 24, 2022 San Jose Spotlight article.

“It’s important to acknowledge that Joanne Segovia drug trafficking was blatant and went on for years which leads us to wonder how she wasn’t caught sooner,” Adamson said. “The ability of Segovia to traffic drugs right under the noses of law enforcement for so long is an obvious example of how broken our law enforcement system is.”

William Armaline, director of the SJSU Human Rights Institute, questioned how Segovia was able to allegedly run this scheme and who may have helped her.

“If the allegations are substantiated, is there any evidence of connection to the use of illegal opioids within law enforcement agencies as evidenced by the overdose death of former SJPD officer and San Jose State University football player DeJon Packer in 2022?” Armaline said.

DeJon Packer was found dead of fentanyl toxication in his Milpitas home in 2022, the former student athlete was the football team’s running back and a rookie officer for SJPD at the time of his death, according to an April 30, 2022 KTVU article.

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan responded to the allegations on his Twitter, thanking U.S. Attorney Ismail Ramsey for following where fentanyl was coming from and holding drug dealers accountable.

“This is an incredibly disturbing

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allegation. No one is above the law, regardless of who their employer is,” Mahan wrote in a March 29, 2023 Tweet.

The San Jose City Council recently unanimously passed Mahan’s budget which included investments to the police officer staff, according to a Tuesday Spartan Daily article.

Sociology and Information Science and Data Analytics sophomore Cole Mitchell, a member of Students For Police Accountability, said the mayor needs to divert efforts away from police.

“I think it’s completely unreasonable to think that just having more and more police is going to actually solve anything in San Jose,” Mitchell said. “We have hundreds of millions of dollars going towards the police unions and police department when we have the number one youth homeless population in the country.”

SJPD had a 17% budget increase since 2019, according to an October 11, 2022 ABC 7 News article.

“We’ve had a growing fentanyl and drug issue in the Bay Area and around the country and it just speaks on the lack of morality in the police department,” Mitchell said.

He said he hopes that Segovia is held to the full extent of the law.

“They often are pushing for more legislation to further criminalize drug use, while being the ones who are directly contributing to the problem,” Mitchell said.

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Pain Index

Continued from page 1 to the same report.

“We’re producing so much wealth . . . surely we can provide enough for our essential workers so they can have the basics,” Myers-Lipton said. “It is outrageous, heartbreaking and not sustainable.”

In 2022, 42% of SJSU students have experienced housing insecurity, while 11.2% of the SJSU student body, around 4,000 students, have experienced houselessness, according to the same report.

Armaline said there were efforts to provide college students with a monthly grant in response to these statistics, but it was rejected by the state and county.

As a result of the 2022 Pain Index, he said the Human Rights Institute connected with Santa Clara County Senator Dave Cortese to produce a California bill that, over the course of five months, would give $1,000 a month to graduating high school seniors who are houseless or suffer from housing insecurity.

Armaline said, although the bill failed to pass for the state, it was proposed at the county level and passed unanimously.

“It would have been great if it passed at a national level, but we were happy to, at least, get it passed for students suffering in the county,” Armaline said.

Myers-Lipton said the growing wealth gap in tech companies between white and POC workers is an example of how the wealthiest people in Silicon Valley hoard wealth in the county, instead of dispersing it back into the community.

“The amount of wealth inequality is not talked about and it is outrageous,” Myers-Lipton said. “You have those top 10 folks making billions of dollars to the point where it’s almost like a monarchy rather than a democracy.”

He said there has to be a structural change in the big tech companies to ensure a change in the wealth gap between white and people of color in the field.

“It’s not rocket science – you say to your senior managers who are mostly all white men that things have to change and your bonuses are going to be tied directly to that,” Myers-Lipton said. “I believe that would bring a fundamental change in wealth in the Silicon Valley.”

Of 126 Apple executives, none of the executives and senior managers are Black, Pacific Islander or Indigenous American men, according to the same report.

In addition, 73% of tech companies in the Silicon Valley have zero Black employees on an executive level and 39% of BIPOC and women workers in tech companies do not feel part of the decision making in these companies, according to the 2022 report.

“What we typically hear from tech companies is that it’s hard to find that talent,” said Jahmal Williams, co-chair of the Black Leadership Kitchen Cabinet of Silicon Valley. “We don’t buy that it is hard to find talented Black people to put in leadership roles.”

In hopes of bringing more attention to the annual report for varying communities struggling with social justice issues, Myers-Lipton said the documentary is currently being transcribed to Spanish and Vietnamese.

“To me, the most exciting part of the documentary was the humanity and diversity of our people,” Myers-Lipton said. “You see the variety of people –across ethnicity and race.”

In the documentary, Gliner captured families and individuals experiencing inequality in the Silicon Valley, ranging from low-income workers to houseless communities.

“All we’re really doing is trying to hold ourselves, as a community, accountable for the commitments we’ve made,” Armaline said. “It is a way to make human rights real in our lives.”

The documentary will air on April 18 at 9 p.m. on KRCB (Comcast 200, AT&T 22, Direct TV 22) with repeats on April 19 at 2 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the appropriate language for referring to people of color. The Spartan Daily regrets this error.

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