Transportation Subcommittee Chair: Shuttle Route Re-Design

During my junior year at RPI, I depended heavily on the school shuttles to get to and from class and lived on the route which was easily the less efficient of the two due to the significantly longer trip with almost twice as many stops. I accepted this mild inconvenience every day until a new stop was added to the already overloaded East Campus loop which required the shuttle to go out of its way to stop at a building used by only a handful of students. I brought my concerns to a friend in the Student Senate who convinced me to join the Facilities and Services Committee and put me in charge of redesigning the shuttle routes.

Simply getting rid of the new stop wasn't an option because the change was made to accommodate an injured student who needed regular access to the building for research, so my first idea was simply to have the West Campus shuttle service the new stop instead. Further discussion with the committee determined that this was a band-aid fix and the entire system needed to be restructured without getting rid of any existing shuttle stops. Our goal was to cut down the run time of each shuttle to 15 minutes or less to eliminate the common experience of waiting forever in the cold for a shuttle that is too full to take any more passengers. I proposed breaking the East Campus shuttle into two separate routes, North and South. This three-loop system had regions of overlap travelling in both directions to allow for more efficient transfers and eliminated the necessity of a central hub. We refined the plan and presented in front of the Student Senate were we received a unanimous vote in favor of implementing the proposed changes.

Link to school news article: https://poly.rpi.edu/news/2019/12/new-shuttle-routes-see-last-minute-changes/