By Alexis Scott | Contributor
Have you ever woken up to catch the bus to campus and think that you’ll make it to class on time? Well, if you’re like me, then you’ve been wrong because the bus only brings you to Paul L. Foster Campus for Business and Innovation and Sid Richardson and class starts in three minutes in Castellaw Communications Center.
The Baylor University Shuttle offers free rides for students from 7:25 a.m. until 5:25 p.m., Monday through Friday. The bus arrives on intervals of 10 to 15 minutes from start of operation to day’s end. The program also has five different bus routes that go to and from a variety of locations such as University Parks Apartments, the Domain and all the way to the View on 10th.
Hundreds of students ride the bus each day, whether that be because they don’t have a car, never purchased a parking pass or don’t want to deal with the campus traffic each morning. The bus is a free and convenient option that also promotes a good practice of using public transportation.
Even though the buses travel to a wide range of off campus locations, once on campus they only provide two stops: Sid Rich and in between the BSB and the business building. These two stops are less than a thousand feet away from one another, but campus itself is over 1,000 acres in size.
After already waiting for the bus to pick them up for 10 or 15 minutes, students may be pressed for time to get to class, but unless their classes are located on the east side of campus, they most likely won’t be on time. Sure, an easy answer would be to have the students wake up earlier and plan their days better. But the reality is that, students are already low on spare time with exams, papers, speeches, experiments, club meetings and sporting events, and the last thing they should have to be more stressed about is sprinting to class because the bus doesn’t travel throughout campus.
The solution is not to drop off each student right in front of their building because that is impractical. But campus covers a wide area and the bus system should accommodate more than two buildings in the same corner of campus.
In order to accommodate underrepresented buildings, Baylor needs to add more bus stops. To include Castellaw, the engineering building, and Hooper-Schaeffer Fine Arts Center there should be a bus stop by the entrance to Jesse J. Jones Library. To accommodate Draper, Old Main, and Mary Gibbs Jones Family and Consumer Sciences Building a bus stop should be installed by Pat Neff or by Memorial Residential College.
Pushback is possible with this proposal because some may wonder: won’t that make the buses take longer? The answer is no, not necessarily. If these stops were added, then additional buses could be added to the current ones. As one bus is taking students off campus there would be another bus on campus on the same route in order to keep service times the same.
Having more bus stops spread out through campus will increase promptness to classes and decrease campus traffic since more students would be taking the bus. Students have plenty of stressors in their minds already and taking the bus and still having to walk 10 minutes to class should not be one of them.
Alexis is a junior political science major from Scottsdale, Ariz.
