When the sun rises, Stephan Myers is already at the corner of 106th Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard, waiting for the 57 bus. The Oakland Technical High School sophomore’s 11-mile commute to school from deep East Oakland takes nearly an hour, so long that he sometimes falls asleep along the way.
But the distance isn’t the main problem, he said. It’s the cost.
Each time he takes the bus, he has to scrape together $1.35, the youth discount fare, for a total of up to $54 a month. Sometimes, when he doesn’t have the money, he ends up asking his friends for cash. Or he’ll ask a bus driver to give him a break and just let him board without paying. Often he avoids the hassle and just bicycles the whole way, returning home exhausted after evening practice sprinting with the track team. “That’s a pretty tedious task,” he said. “Eleven miles up a bunch of hills for an hour is not fun.”…