The University today announced that effective October 12, the South Route which principally serves the Water Street Residence Hall and Route 80 which principally serves the 80 Lafayette Street Residence Hall will be separate routes on a full-time basis. Since the start of the school year, the routes have been separate during the peak hours when students are leaving residence halls for class; they have been combined during off-peak hours.
Jules Martin, who, as assistant vice president for protection services, oversees the transportation services provided to the University by Gray Line, said, “Our commitment is to provide an effective, safe, dedicated transportation system for our students which works. This is something we constantly emphasize to Gray Lines. We recognize there are student concerns and complaints about the transportation services they have been receiving, and a good number are coming from students in the residences to the south of campus who find that buses are not coming on time and are taking to long to complete their routes.
“We have discussed this with Gray Line, and, accordingly, as a first step, we are going to separate the routes that serve Water Street and 80 Lafayette Street around the clock. We are hopeful that this will yield some improvement.
“We are also talking with Gray Line about a number of other issues that have arisen from student feedback, including: ways in which we can improve information flow to students about the status of bus operations so that they can plan accordingly; the manner in which customer relations are handled, both by dispatchers and drivers; the need for students to be able to identify dispatchers so that they can get updates; system communications; and other operational issues that effective the timeliness and reliability of the system.
“It is important to us to get feedback from students on problems they are having. This is New York City, and traffic doesn’t always flow smoothly; that’s simply a fact of life. But that’s not an excuse for not delivering good transportation services. So students should make use of the forms they can obtain in the Information Center and let us know about problems. We want to hear about them, and we want to work with Gray Line to correct them.”
New schedules with times and pick-up and drop-off locations will be posted