UConn Buses. (Photo by Charlotte Lao/The Daily Campus)
Buses have been such an issue this year. From the multitude of changes last semester to the routes of the various lines, everyone was still left a little unhappy. Message boards for students were bombarded with complaints, suggestions and jokes about UConn’s transportation.
All of this has been brought on by the various construction sites around campus necessitating less traffic in their area. Frustratingly, though, the line changes that occurred were put in place with little notice, without student input and with seemingly no logic at all. Most agreed that these lines served them less well than before.
This was especially an issue for commuter undergraduate students, who also saw their available parking lots cut down in the fall. All in all, tension was high, and UConn scrambled to try to find a solution. Again, though, the university came to the end of the fall semester with no pleasing bus line for the campus population.
While this spinning of wheels can still be critiqued, it seems that not all of their efforts in the fall were in vain. Data collected in the fall from surveys and other student inquiry have prompted yet another set of changes to the bus lines that service Storrs. The press release for this has much better reasoning for the changes. Not only do they cite the feedback as the driving factor in the decisions, but they also provide results from the surveys sent out in the fall.
Granted, the weekday changes are minor, with only the yellow line changing routes. The more interesting aspect is the sizable change to the weekend shuttles. Rather than a slow, on-demand service, students will now be able to track two curated lines on the weekend, just as during the week. While some will surely bemoan the diminished customizability of this, the demand of a proper service, especially in the winter, makes this a fair trade.
This represents a newfound transparency and logic to UConn transportation services, a welcome change for sure. One can only hope that this trend will continue as they deal with the student’s wishes for getting around such a large campus.
