5 minutes. A Stevens student stands alone on a street corner, anxiously checking their phone for information they are quickly learning not to trust. 3 minutes. The prediction says, despite the small arrow marker slowly swimming down the Hudson. 1 minute. Heading to work on campus, they cringe at the idea of walking up the hill every day. Arriving now. They don’t even read the last update, as they can see the gray van rounding the far corner. They release a sigh of relief and put their phone away as the shuttle approaches, but start to panic as soon as they notice it isn’t slowing down whatsoever. “Completo!” the driver yells, continuing along the route with a full shuttle, leaving the student behind to be late for their shift.
This story colorfully displays the current state of the Stevens Shuttle Program, as it struggles from overcrowding and an app that is inconsistent at best.
Starting off with the problem of the app, unfortunately it is completely out of Residence Life’s control, since it is managed by TransLoc, an outside company. Further, the school uses the Academy Bus company as a liaison to TransLoc, rather than being in direct contact with the company. That being said, most of the issues students have observed with the bus location markers have rather ordinary explanations. A number of other local colleges also use TransLoc, namely Columbia and New York University, so sometimes their buses can appear for Stevens users by accident. The location tags also need to physically be turned off by the shuttle drivers, so when students see stationary shuttles or shuttles headed to non-serviced parts of Hoboken, they are almost always seeing forgetful drivers on lunch break or headed back to Academy’s garage. There are still glitches of course, such as when shuttles appear to be floating down the Hudson, but for the most part, these issues have mundane causes and aren’t going anywhere.
Moving on, overcrowding can be addressed more directly by Stevens itself. Recently, a second shuttle was already added to the Red Line and the Gray Line during peak hours to supplement service. Evident from students’ ongoing issues, this additional rush hour service hasn’t been enough to combat all of the overcrowding. When The Stute talked to Tony Blazini, the Director of Residential and Dining Services, he outlined two main strategies for additional congestion alleviation.
The first is straightforward — adding another full-time shuttle to the Red and/or Gray Lines. While another shuttle would no doubt improve service, this plan would require a significant amount of extra funding, and would, therefore, need more hard data than Blazini currently has to back it up. Luckily, shuttle drivers keep count of ridership totals and provide reports to Residential and Dining Services once or twice per semester. One of the reports should be finished soon. However, the drivers do not record how many students are left behind at each stop, data which would show how far past capacity the shuttles are at given times.
The second is less fleshed out — issuing bus passes to certain students. The specifics of exactly how these passes would work are still up in the air, as they could take a number of different forms. As Blazini himself puts it, “the issue with that is the shuttles, even though the Red and the Gray primarily service the residential students, all the shuttles […] are open to the entire Stevens community at any time that they are actively operating. So, we want to find a way that we can still accommodate our residential students, but also try to alleviate some of the overcrowding as well.” He went on to say that the primary concern with implementing a bus pass is excluding everyone who does not get one, so the plan would need to be further discussed before anything concrete is decided on.
Student Government Association (SGA) Senator Karen Garcia also spoke with Tony Blazini about these very issues. She spoke at length about them in a recent SGA Senate meeting, where the Senate debated how exactly to implement a possible bus pass system. She mentioned how funding for the Red and Gray Lines comes directly from the Office of Residential and Dining Service’s budget (with funding for the Green Line coming from the graduate school), providing a basis for prioritizing Stevens Leased Housing occupants over the graduate students who have been contributing to overcrowding. The Senate did not come to any firm conclusions, but favored issuing passes to Stevens Leased Housing occupants and having shuttles prioritize serving students with the card, rather than requiring a pass for entry onto the shuttle. To see the entire debate, the relevant Senate meeting that took place on October 8, 2018 is available at youtube.com/sittv and the shuttle discussion starts at about 1:22:45. Garcia also said that the Rider application, which students rely on for information about the shuttles, allows users to submit feedback in the settings page and that those submissions go directly to Tony Blazini. She encourages students to give their feedback, as it can help give Blazini the feedback he needs to support funding an extra full-time shuttle on the Red and/or Gray Lines.
As a final note, the Stevens Public Incident Report has a section about the shuttle system, but it is often noted that submissions to the form rarely receive replies. To test this, The Stute submitted a request for comment to this form on October 11 and has not received a reply as when this article was published.
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