Walking under the scorching sun from the parking lot to the safety of shade on campus is a grievance some students are all too familiar with, but come early September, relief will be provided.
UTRGV will soon have a new microtransit service named VOLT to take students to and from “remote parking areas” far from the solace of shade to the campus perimeter, all in “five minutes or less.”
“So, VOLT is basically a fleet of street-legal, all-electric vehicles,” said Gabriel Zuñiga, director of Transportation Services. “They’re going to be orange, and they’ll have a seating capacity of eight, so seven passengers and the driver. They’ll have a frequency of about five minutes or less here. Edinburg will have three different routes. In Brownsville, we’ll have two different routes.”
Twenty-three golf carts were purchased for the new VOLT system. Eight will be on the Brownsville campus and the remaining on the Edinburg campus.
Two of the 23 carts will be ADA accessible, meaning they will be able to accommodate a wheelchair.
“So, we’ll have one here and one in Brownsville and, so, in the event that somebody needs to use a service and is in a wheelchair or some type of a motor device, we can provide that service to them as well,” Zuñiga said. “All of our drivers will be trained to use the ramp and also to be able to secure the wheelchair in place for safety purposes.”
VOLT’s service hours will be from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. with no break and will stop in frequencies of five minutes or less, compared to the previous Campus Circulator system that stopped at frequencies of 20 minutes.
Zuñiga said the new vehicles can be driven on the street, sidewalk and on a “large, multimodal hike-and-bike trail” primarily for vehicles and bikes that they plan on creating sometime in the future.
In the event of rain, all carts come equipped with weather guards in the back and front, as well as Texas Department of Transportation-approved windshields equipped with wipers.
“They’ll be able to operate in rain or any weather,” Zuñiga said. “They will be shut down, however, when it starts to flood, because they’re only a few inches off the ground versus our vehicles. … As a contingency, we will roll out our big-capacity vehicles, which are our buses.”
He said that despite having no air conditioning, the golf carts do not feel hot due to the breeze that dissipates the humidity and heat to a certain degree.
VOLT vehicles will also come equipped with Wi-Fi, LED lights, an amber light on top, a PA system along with several security cameras for use in the event of an accident or incident.
The vehicles and the university’s buses will be equipped with GPS that can be accessed through an app called Ride Systems.
“Once you download that [app], right, you’ll be able to track all of our golf carts, along with all of our buses, so it’s one big congruent system,” Zuñiga said.
Each vehicle cost, on average, about $18,000, including all the technology it possesses.
“Much of this funding comes from the savings from removing both Circulator routes from service. Other funding sources come from the Federal Transit Administration,” Zuñiga said. “We are able to subsidize our operational costs at 50%, while subsidizing capital costs at 80%. Due to this fact and our partnership with the LRGVDC (Lower Rio Grande Valley Development Council), the university gains millions on a per year average.”
Because VOLT are street-legal vehicles, students not wearing a seatbelt are at risk of being cited if they are stopped by the police department, he said.
Zuñiga said VOLT is being implemented to incentivize students to purchase Zone 1 parking permits in the hope of relieving “congestion” of traffic primarily within Zone 2 parking.
Asked if the new VOLT system would encourage him to purchase Zone 1 parking, Miguel Alanis, a theatre senior, replied, “For sure, because first of all, Zone 1 is not that expensive as Zone 2 and second, I can arrive in Zone 1 at a certain time and they can take me … where I have to go, and don’t have to walk.”
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