Moderators: jcmanson, Sly Fox, BuryYourDuke
vastrightwinger wrote:I(easy for them to say since they were not the ones walking all over).LA-ZY! Geesh. That is the price of going to a medium-sized university. The students need to deal with it and stop the complaining!
PAmedic wrote:you're absolutely right
ATrain wrote:Two large parking lots on Campus North, a perimeter road running from Dorm 33 to North Campus, and new screens in the Vines Center...all to be completed in 4-6 weeks with the screens in place by next Wednesday.thanks
TallyW wrote:That's my thought... Where could they run that road? It doesn't seem like there is room b/c of the train tracks.I third that emotion- have been scratching my head since I read the post trying to figure where they could put that.
JLFJR wrote:Thanks for your input, PA! Very helpful.
LU seeks bus shuttle to ease campus traffic
By Ron Brown and Conor Reilly
With more than 9,600 students and 3,300 employees, Liberty University has a perpetual traffic jam on campus during the week.
The Greater Lynchburg Transit Company, meanwhile, has declining ridership and a consistent budget deficit.
Can one help the other?
Possibly.
Since last year, LU has had several discussions with GLTC officials about starting bus service on campus.
But so far, there has been little to show from the talks between LU and GLTC. And a recent $100,000 ridership study done by GLTC’s parent company did not factor LU in as a component of its potential future customer base.
“As far as the study, at that point, we were not talking to LU,” GLTC General Manager Mike Carroll said. “It was really not part of the scope of the work.”
Under one proposal, LU would charge each student an annual fee for the service and the university would, in turn, pay GLTC a flat amount annually. Similar arrangements exist between the town of Blacksburg’s transit service and Virginia Tech, as well as Harrisonburg and James Madison University.
LU now is moving to provide its own on-campus shuttle service, using Thomas Road Baptist Church buses.
“This year, the traffic problems on campus are all day long,” said Jerry Falwell Jr., the school’s vice chancellor. “We still have a big problem. It’s worse this year than it was last year.”
Carroll said LU faces “huge” transportation issues and said he is willing to work with them.
GLTC did provide service to LU’s campus several years ago, but the routes failed to generate enough ridership. At the time, students were required to pay regular fare for each ride.
“The feeling was, why do we keep going up here when we’re not getting any (riders) from it,” Carroll said.
One idea that has been discussed in the past year was the possibility of GLTC providing an on-campus shuttle for students and LU workers, who would need only their university ID to board the bus.
“We asked them for specifics as far as what they could do for on-campus routes and what they could do as far as connecting us with the Lynchburg community,” said Lee Beaumont, LU’s director of auxiliary services, who met with GLTC officials last November.
“We asked them specifically if they could do some test runs for us and have a bus here before spring semester ended to see how students would respond to it. We never heard back from them.”
Carroll said talks have been preliminary, and no funding sources have been identified.
He said he wants to make sure existing service doesn’t suffer if resources are diverted to LU.
“I don’t have buckets of money sitting around here,” Carroll said. “And the other thing is, I don’t have a lot of extra buses.”
Other localities that have major colleges in Virginia are finding a way to make a bus system work on campus.
And locally, GLTC serves Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, albeit in a limited manner.
R-MWC officials approached the bus company last year, and wanted to provide access to shopping areas for their 700 students. The college pays GLTC a flat fee and students ride using their IDs.
Carroll said the program has been successful, and this year GLTC has expanded the service hours. It brought in $15,000 last year, and this year he has budgeted for $60,000.
Barry N. Moore, LU’s vice president for university relations, is now serving as the point man for the school in negotiations with GLTC. Moore and GLTC officials have met twice and a third meeting is scheduled later this month.
“We’d like to see some modifications of the bus routes this winter, no doubt,” Moore said. “We brought GLTC officials out here and we spent about two hours showing them the campus. We took them out when the students were here and in a rush ... I think they got a better sense of the thrivingness of this campus.”
With LU’s residential student body heading toward the 10,000 mark, a bus fee of $100 a year per student would mean $1 million in new money.
“If you just look at the fiscal part of it, GLTC would get a check from Liberty every semester,” Beaumont said. “It’s guaranteed revenue.”GLTC went to Lynchburg City Council this year for a $173,000 supplemental appropriation that was tacked on to an initial local allocation of $680,000 in city taxpayers’ money for GLTC operations.
“With almost 7,000 commuters and employees - mostly from Lynchburg - coming on and off this campus every day, I know that there is a way that public transportation can help solve some of our issues,” said Moore, who previously worked at Virginia Tech.
He said Blacksburg Transit meets the transportation needs in and around the Tech campus with a student fee-based arrangement.
Tech collects a bus fee from its students of $43.50 per semester and pays the transit company in lump-sum payments, said Evelyn Ratcliffe, Tech’s bursar.
Larry Hincker, a Tech spokesman, said Tech pays almost $2 million a year from bus fees it collects from students.
“About 90 percent of (the) ridership is Tech students,” he said.
In Harrisonburg, James Madison University students ride on a city-owned and operated bus system. JMU collects bus fees from students and pays the city about $800,000 a year.
“When JMU is not here we run five buses,” said Reggie Smith, Harrisonburg’s director of public transportation. “When JMU is here we run 25 buses. When JMU is not here we haul about 500 people a day. When JMU is here we haul between 8,000 to 11,000 people a day.”
JMU and Harrisonburg have been working together on bus service for nearly two decades.
Like Tech, JMU students use their college ID as a ticket to ride.
As the university has grown, so has the bus ridership. JMU had about 9,000 students in 1982 compared to 17,000 in 2006.
“We’ve been fortunate that most of the big student housing complexes are close to campus,” Smith said. “We have drawn most of the routes on campus ourselves.”
Smith said the key to success is constant communication.
“We work with them,” he said. “Our schedule for those complexes is set up on the students’ class schedules. At class time, our buses are packed.”Smith said the bus service must be attuned to changing needs.
“We cannot be stagnant,” he said. “It amazes me to hear of bus systems that haven’t changed their routes for 15 years. We change our routes almost every semester. We look at the numbers and the routes that are low and decide what we can do to get passengers on that route.”
The goal of the university and the city is not necessarily the same, he said.
“JMU pays us to get those students to and from class,” Smith said. “The city wants us to take those students from JMU and from their apartment complexes to Valley Mall, Wal-Mart and all those places to use daddy’s credit card.
“On Friday and Saturday nights, we’ll haul 5,000 to 8,000 kids. It’s a service and the city is reaping the benefit of those sales tax dollars.”
Carroll said the GLTC board is hopeful that the bus company can serve Lynchburg’s colleges.
“If we’re able to work out a deal with Liberty,” he said, “we’re going to have to expand the fleet.”
Meanwhile, LU is trying to resolve its on-campus transportation problems and expects to start its own shuttle service within the next two weeks.
It will initially use six buses from Thomas Road Baptist Church to move students and employees around campus.
“We have to look at the routes, the bus stops we want to use, the student participation we’re going to get and how quickly we can get to each stop,” Beaumont said. “You want to have 10 to 12 minutes between stops.”
Falwell Jr. said Liberty and GLTC could still pursue a working agreement similar to those at Tech and JMU.
“I don’t know anything about the inner workings of GLTC,” he said. “I don’t know if providing service to Liberty is a profitable thing for them or a costly thing for them. We see a problem and try to solve it. If we can’t solve it one way, then we’ll look at other ways to solve it.”
By building GLTC ridership, LU could lessen its need for a perpetual parking lot building program and allow more of the campus to remain green.
Efficient bus service would also allow students to safely get to shopping areas along Wards Road or travel to restaurants downtown.
“There are things that could interest students here,” Moore said.
“We are sitting on thousands of students. Instead of having a bus with three people on it, let the bus swing by here and take 18 people downtown.
“You have a huge segment of potential customers over here.”
El Scorcho wrote:post at your own risk.
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