Following the implementation of a series of changes at the beginning of the academic year, the Boston University Shuttle bus ridership and service are running smoothly, and officials are looking to the future for further revisions.
In August, Parking and Transportation Services held multiple focus group meetings and decided to increase peak late-night weekday hours for the BUS and carry out daytime shuttle service on Saturdays, said William Hajjar, director of BU Parking and Transportation Services, in an email.
“The service seems to be going well. Ridership will be evaluated during the Spring Semester,” Hajjar said. “I’ve received positive feedback from … [students] saying that it is providing them with a much needed service.”
In the future, Hajjar said the Parking and Transportation Services looks to invest in an automatic passenger count system on the BUS.
“The proper system would provide accurate counts of every stop and every shuttle to measure ridership, with a goal to improve service and identify underutilized service,” Hajjar said. “We will also be working on measures to improve our effectiveness in communicating with the community via social media.”
Hajjar said he worked in conjunction with BU Student Government President Richa Kaul and Chief of Staff Pablo Das, who had previously proposed several BUS initiatives.
SG Senate Chair Tyler Fields said obtaining Saturday BUS hours was one of the projects SG worked with Parking and Transportation Services on.
“We worked on it all summer,” Fields said. “Administration was pretty receptive. In terms of student feedback, we’ve had a really, really positive response. Students have been happy and actually gone out of their way to express how happy they are. That’s really the best we can ask for.”
Fields said the process to get the extended service was extensive and required a lot of collaboration.
“We had to touch on every municipality that the bus route covers. You have to go through and make sure that’s okay that you’re running a bus route service,” he said. “BU Parking and Transportation were obviously the ones paying for it.”
In the past year, Hajjar said Parking and Transportation Services has added larger buses to increase rider capacity, removed an underutilized stop along by the BU Medical Campus and implemented more frequent evening hours.
Despite changes to service, several students said they take issue with the way the BUS is currently run.
Lexie Gold, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, said because the BUS service is unreliable, she has switched to walking and using the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority service.
“Even though I tracked it, sometimes the BUS would come to StuVi [Student Village II] and then it would be out of service, and then I would have five minutes to get to class or something, or it would be running late,” she said. “It was nice to have something that goes just on our campus. I wouldn’t get lost that way.”
Erin Strickland, a junior in the School of Education, said there are not enough shuttle buses running at given times, and the BUS should go further west on BU’s Charles River Campus than StuVi 2.
“I wish that the BUS would go further into Allston,” she said. “It’s sad that it stops only at West, because we have so many students out in Allston that I think it would be a really good idea to improve that. I kind of just see it as something very silly at this point because it doesn’t do anything for me anymore.”
Luke Sakakeeny, a junior in the College of Engineering, said he enjoys the free shuttle service, but it is usually too crowded to use.
“If [it allows] people to travel up and down the campus freely, especially during the weekend hours, if it’s just for fun … having the free service is definitely helpful,” he said. “I don’t take it nearly as often as I see some of my peers do. It’s almost always packed to the brim.”
Overall, Hajjar said Parking and Transportation Services hopes to continue to communicate the “realities” of the BUS system and its primary purposes.
“The BUS was not meant to replace the primary methods of moving across the Charles River Campus, such as walking or cycling,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that we are reaching a point where adding more buses during peak times to existing routes will not positively improve travel time or rider satisfaction, but would simply result in more buses sitting in traffic or getting bunched up along the route.”
Finally! It has been noted that the BU Shuttle is primarily to transport between the Charles River and MED campuses. The rest of you can stop being lazy and walk to class.