Some riders say the current number of UTRGV shuttles is not enough to accommodate all who use them. The Department of Parking and Transportation has ordered five new shuttle buses to address this problem, university officials say.
“We’re expecting new shuttles to be available at the start of next school year,” said Rodney Gomez, UTRGV director of Parking and Transportation.
During the fall semester, 33,992 students, faculty and staff used the Campus Connector and 24,000 used the Campus Shuttle services. The Campus Connector transports students, faculty and staff between campuses. The Campus Shuttle transports riders around their respective campus.
Khalid Aada, a literatures and cultural studies lecturer from Brownsville, has used the shuttle services since Fall 2015.
“As faculty, my experience was horrible since Fall 2015, but last Fall 2016 was something unbelievable,” Aada said. “There [was] never enough buses. The drivers used to leave before the time, in general, and the only two buses were smaller for the quantity of students and faculty that needed to take this transport. Always students and faculty were left behind.”
Daniel Corona, a mechanical engineering student from San Benito, has used the Campus Connector since the opening of UTRGV in Fall 2015.
Last semester, Corona used the Harlingen route to take the 6:30 a.m. shuttle to be on time for his morning class on the Edinburg campus.
“The time was great at 6:30 a.m. Yet, that lasted about two weeks and it was moved to 6:45 a.m. I didn’t see an inconvenience until the first day of the new change, when I was going to use it to go to my Edinburg classes on Tuesday and Thursdays. The bus would not arrive until 7 a.m. For me, it was frustrating because I had class at 8 a.m. and the professor had strict rules about tardiness.”
Corona said that wasn’t the only inconvenience he experienced while riding the Campus Connector.
“There wasn’t any designated areas or shaded areas for students and staff to wait for the arrival of the next bus,” he said, referring to the bus stop in Harlingen. “The buses were never on time and it was always 15 to 30 minutes late.”
Since the new shuttles won’t be available until Fall 2017, adjustments need to be made to meet the demand for Spring 2017 semester.
“We’re going [to] continue to allocate our resources as best as we can, so that if we need to put more buses on the connector, we’ll put them on there. We don’t want to strand [students] on different campuses. If we need to pull vehicles off the circulator routes on campus, we’ll go ahead and do that and put them on the connector; that way, we don’t leave people 60 miles away from where they need to be,” Gomez said.
Each new bus will have a 40-seat capacity. The new five buses will cost a combined total of $800,000 and are being funded by the Student Services fee, which pays for 20 percent, Federal Transit Administration and through a partnership with Valley Metro. Currently, two buses hold a 30-seat capacity and the next largest is a 22-seater. The Campus Connector currently has four buses, two in Edinburg and two in Brownsville.
The percentage of riders in Brownsville is 49.7, compared with 50.3 percent in Edinburg, Gomez said. In Fall 2015, the total number of riders was 5,469 and increased to 33,992 in Fall 2016.
For athletic events in Edinburg, there is no shuttle to transport attendees from Brownsville, except for the regularly scheduled shuttles.
All shuttles are equipped with Wi-Fi, Gomez said. Shuttle routes and schedules are available online at utrgv.edu/transportation.
If schedules or routes change, notifications will be posted on the Parking and Transportation’s website or its Twitter account, @utrgv_pts. Announcements will be posted on buses, bus shelters and bus stops.
For more information regarding UTRGV shuttle services, call Parking and Transportation at 665-2738.
