The UO Campus Shuttle will be closing two of its routes to create one route that serves most of the drop-off and pick-up locations that UO students request. It will no longer serve the 13th and Olive apartments, nor the apartments near Autzen Stadium.
Campus Shuttle collected data to measure which locations were most frequently requested as pick-up and drop-off locations by students and used the information to create a new route.
“It’s a culmination — that one route — of all of the most frequent stops,” said Ashley Dougherty, the program manager of Safe Rides, which is the UO Police Department program that also manages Safe Ride and the Designated Driver Shuttle.
Previously, the Campus Shuttle offered three routes: One winded around the northern half of campus, another included a stop at the 13th and Olive apartments and one was an Autzen Line that the service added in April 2018.
One factor that led to the service adding the former two routes was the string of robberies in March 2018, Dougherty said, which caused students to request new locations and for Campus Shuttle to rent four additional vans during that time.
“We were identifying new needs of areas that people were requesting,” Dougherty said.
Katie Mendiburu, a Campus Shuttle shift lead who has worked with the program since March 2018, said that as a new program, although it’s a lot of hard work, it’s rewarding to have a “tangible impact” for students.
“You got to see that hard work and this planning that had to come together very quickly come to fruition and students be thankful that we were there,” Mendiburu said. “I felt like I was actually helping people.”
On May 6, the Campus Shuttle announced that it would start running the Autzen route four times a night “due to a small amount of people using this line,” according to a post on the Campus Shuttle Facebook page. The service also did not run the predetermined route at least two other times before this, according to announcements on its Facebook page, but it did accept requests from students to be taken or dropped off from apartments near Autzen.
Campus Shuttle was intended to be a “temporary solution” to lower the turnaway rates of Safe Ride and the Designated Driver Shuttle, Dougherty said. But even after the Campus Shuttle began running, turnaway rates did not fall.
Instead, the service found a new population of students to serve, said Dougherty, who also said that some may be using Campus Shuttle to get to and from class or get to their car at night.
During the 2017-18 school year, Safe Ride had 33,715 riders and the Designated Driver Shuttle shuttled 16,265.
“It’s a really good assistance to two thriving programs,” said Talon Kennedy, a Campus Shuttle coordinator who manages drivers and other staff.
Campus Shuttle has served over 10,000 students as of June 2018, according to data obtained from UOPD. The service has two vans running as of this moment.
UO students can visit the shuttle’s website or the UOregon app for routes and the real-time locations of shuttles. The UO Campus Shuttle operates from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. daily in fall and winter term, and from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. in spring term.
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