Ridership for the University of Maryland’s Shuttle-UM and Nite Ride services has increased between fiscal 2015 and fiscal 2016, according to the 2015-16 DOTS Annual Report.
Shuttle-UM took on more than 190,000 additional riders, while there were about 8,000 more passengers using Nite Ride during the same time period.
DOTS Director David Allen said that ridership numbers on any given year fluctuate depending on various factors. Allen noted that DOTS provides Shuttle-UM services to the University of Maryland Baltimore and the University of Baltimore in addition to this university, so he said the increase in Shuttle-UM ridership could be attributed to increased shuttle use on the other campuses.
There is nothing “specific that is causing it [to rise],” Allen said. “It’s just how people feel about their ability to take public transit.”
On the other hand, the Nite Ride statistics are specific to this university, and could possibly be attributed to recent development in the area, Allen said.
“It could be because there are new [apartment] complexes near us, where people could rely on getting to the College Park Metro and that sort of thing,” he said.
Although DOTS isn’t doing anything new in response to the increase in ridership statistics, Allen said, it did recently get six new Shuttle-UM buses in the past few months that are in service now. Because they have new buses, some of the older buses will start to be phased out, making the net number of buses remain steady, he noted.
“When you think about it, when you’re almost at 3.5 million riders [each year], a 100,000 [increase] over a year is very manageable,” Allen said.
Tyler Ziegler, a sophomore government and politics major and DOTS employee, said he has heard other Shuttle-UM drivers talking about the increase in ridership that they’ve noticed. In terms of the crowds on the buses that can be seen from time to time, Ziegler said the number of people on a bus is up to the driver’s discretion for the most part.
The uptick in ridership “hasn’t been drastic, but … I have seen it,” he said. “Different sized buses have different occupancy capacities, and those occupancy capacities range, so really it’s up to whatever the driver feels comfortable with.”
The effectiveness of Nite Ride would increase drastically if they were able to add more buses, senior government and politics major Eric Pardo said.
Pardo used the service regularly over the summer because the Courtyards buses weren’t serviced, he said, and he frequently had to wait for long periods of time due to bad connection with the operator and the small number of available buses. He said at one point he waited almost two hours in the middle of the night because of these complications.
“I never really had [a bus] that was too overcrowded … but I think they would be able to decrease those wait times if they had more vehicles,” Pardo said. “I hate to bash on it a lot because I think it’s a great service; I think it’s an important thing really for public safety. But like anything, it could be improved, and if there’s room for improvement, we ought to be addressing that.”
Regardless of the implications of increased ridership, Allen said he has a very optimistic outlook on the future of Shuttle-UM and Nite Ride use.
“I definitely look at [increased ridership] as a good thing,” Allen said “I think that although students don’t necessarily love standing-room only on buses, that’s fully utilizing the resource. So we would like to see as many students on the buses as possible.”
