TCAT Receives Funding Increase

By PATRICK KUEHL Sun Contributor

The Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit reached an agreement on Jan. 20 with its three local donors — the City of Ithaca, Tompkins County and Cornell University — to increase their contributions by five percent for the coming fiscal year.

The three underwriters are obligated to give the same amount of finances each year, as agreed upon in a contract organized in 1991. An eight percent increase was proposed this year to address inflation, supply chain issues and staffing shortages which led to reduced TCAT services. While the city of Ithaca and Tompkins County agreed, Cornell raised concerns based on the TCAT’s budgeting.

Cornell’s Vice President of University Relations Joel M. Malina stated to the Ithaca Times that Cornell would keep up their commitment as an underwriter to the TCAT but was unwilling to drastically increase their financial contribution to eight percent in a Dec. 29 article.

“TCAT has not offered any specific justification for such a large increase in the underwriter contribution,” Malina said.

Furthermore, Malina argues that TCAT already holds adequate fund- ing. “[TCAT administration] holds approximately $16 million in reserve and fund balance with an additional $15 million in grant funding,” Malina said. grad believes that users are unnerved by the humanlike capacities of ChatGPT communication.

The grant funding came from an $8.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Low or No Emission program and a $7 million grant from the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority. The DOT grant is intended to fund 10 electric buses, while the NY State grant was unspecified.

“I believe that [what is] most revolutionary about ChatGPT and other AI advancements of the last years is not necessarily the technology itself, but how it openly challenges the boundaries between humans and machines,” Guridi said. “What scares people is how we [accept that] technologies can [now] do things we [previously] believed were exclusively human, which forces us to rethink what is to be human, how we generate value and how we will live with these systems.”

Universities are struggling to maintain academic integrity amidst this technological development. An informal and anonymous poll conducted by The Stanford Daily reported that 17 percent of Stanford student respondents admitted to utilizing ChatGPT on their fall quarter assignments and exams.