The university plans to add a new shuttle route to Bethesda beginning next year in an effort to ease commuting difficulties and transportation costs for the growing number of students living off the campus.
Department of Transportation Director David Allen said he will also look to add more buses to the routes serving South Campus and the Route 1 area.
However, both plans are still tentative. Allen said DOTS may not have the money to add the Bethesda route and increase service on the Campus Connector South and the Route 1 Corridor routes, but said he had “hopes and dreams” that all three would begin next year.
With gas prices skyrocketing and more students living off the campus because of an on-campus housing shortage, the shuttle service is likely to see rising demand. And Allen said ridership is already on the rise on some routes.
He said the Route 1 Corridor shuttle has become popular both as a way to help students who live along Route 1 get to the campus and a way for students living on the campus to travel to local shopping areas on evenings and weekends. The route’s popularity during its first year, he said, made DOTS decide to increase its frequency.
The additional buses serving the Route 1 Corridor would create stops every 35 minutes instead of every hour and five minutes, he said. The route runs from near the Beltway in the north to Franklin’s Restaurant in Hyattsville in the south.
Allen also said the Campus Connector South route has become more popular. It connects the North Campus dorms to Old Town and various locations along the southern edge of campus.
But students and other riders often cite long gaps of time between stops on both routes as reasons they don’t take Shuttle-UM buses, Allen said. The addition of another bus to the Campus Connector South route would decrease the time between stops from 30 minutes to 15.
The possibility of more buses along Route 1 pleased some students.
“We definitely have too few buses. Either I catch the bus at 9:40 a.m., or I have to get it two hours later,” said information studies graduate student Sheri Massey, who rides the Route 1 Corridor bus to get to classes and meetings. “So if I have to get to campus at 9 a.m., then I need to get on the bus at 8 a.m.”
But other riders of the Route 1 Corridor buses say ridership isn’t high, and more stops aren’t needed.
“One or two or five people is the most that’s ever been on [the bus] when I’ve been on it,” said Louise Neu, an administrative assistant in the department of electrical and computer engineering. “What we need is a smaller bus.”
Allen said that a Park & Ride shuttle bus servicing the Bethesda area will help commuters deal with the rising cost of gas and parking on the campus.
“We’ve identified [Bethesda] as having a lot of people from campus who commute,” said Allen. “We’d like to give them the same opportunities we do for Laurel and Bowie.”
There are currently three Park & Ride shuttles to Laurel, Bowie and Burtonsville.
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