Campus bus routes to change in August

All campus bus routes will get a makeover by the time students return to campus in August.

The Student Transportation Board presented five major concept changes during a public meeting Monday, IU Campus Bus Service operations manager Perry Maull said.
Four were approved unanimously by the STB.  

All buses are adding stops to their routes.

The X Bus will add stops at Woodlawn Avenue and Seventh Street; the B route will add stops at the Maurer School of Law and Jordan Hall; and the A route will return to an earlier route system, for which bus stops will be restored at the Sample Gates, the Indiana Memorial Union, Collins Living-Learning Center, Woodlawn Field and the Kelley School of Business, in that order.

The A bus is returning to the route that preceded the expansion at the Kelley School.
The re-routing brought on by the expansion resulted in decreased ridership, according to the agenda of Monday’s meeting.

But the D and E routes are seeing the biggest adjustments. The two will be combined and go by the E route name, according to an April 21 notice to students from
the STB.

This change has caused some controversy. Some think the combination of the two routes will fill buses too quickly, leaving a large chunk of the route to be denied service because of full capacity.

Shannon Foley, an IU Campus Bus driver, has been giving students rides along the D route for years.

She said in an email to the IDS and the STB that to combine the D and E routes would mean cutting service to many stops in the latter half of the route.

“The E route can’t adequately service Evermann, Red Bud, Campus View, Cedar Hall and Willkie, Rose and Forest,” Foley said. “You have to keep in mind that any one bus alone can only hold a maximum of 75 students. During the busy times on campus, that number is reached before the E route even makes it to 10th Street. That’s where the D bus picks up the slack.”

Once the bus gets to Cedar Hall of Union Street Apartments, she said, the bus is already packed. There, she often has to ask people to move closer together to let new passengers on.

After that, fitting more becomes almost impossible, she said.

“You can take 13, maybe 15 if you plead with everyone to move, which is like herding cats in a thunderstorm,” Foley said. “You have now left 12 to 14 people at the bus stop who are going to be late to class or just can’t make it without the bus.”

She said the rest of the people still waiting just won’t be able to get on.

“Now what do you do about those at the next stop at Seventh and Union?” Foley said. “Who gets to tell those at the Willkie bus stop you can’t get on the bus? What about Forest?”

When the D and E routes are combined, she said, she believes there simply won’t be enough buses to go around. More buses would have to be added, which might not be in the Campus Bus Services’ budget.

The budget is already tight. The Campus Bus Service receives $200,000 a year from Parking Operations. It’s supposed to go toward bus replacement, but replacing just one bus costs $380,000, according to a statement from Maull.

“The only way the E route can handle the D route added is if there are four buses, two running behind each other all the time,” Foley said. “With the proposed changes, the E route will be covering the largest population distribution of all the campus bus routes. It will be covering even more than the A or B routes, and those routes have five buses each.”

Foley said she believes the current D and E routes are about as good as they can get and call for no change.

“The current routes, the E with one full-time bus and one busy-time bus, and the D bus with two full buses is as minimal as you can get and still maintain adequate services to all the students living on the north east and south east of campus,” she said.
But the D and E route combination is the only change that is expected to save the Campus Bus Service any money.

The merge would save one bus a day, which would reel in about $38,000 of savings
annually.

In the agenda, the Bus Services acknowledged this would most likely cause a decline in ridership.

The last concept of the five on the agenda proposed the E bus that runs during breaks should stop. That item was tabled and will be reviewed by the STB at a Sept. 15 meeting, Maull said.

If approved, it will take effect during the 2014 Thanksgiving break. This would mean students who stay on campus during breaks will have one less major mode of
transportation.

The STB could not be reached for further comment about the adjustments.

More detailed information on the changes is available online at go.iu.edu/aNN.