Community Shuttle program to begin runs next week

Gregory Armstrong Guest Writer

After months of planning and number crunching, a regular Vassar-sponsored shuttle service is set to start up next week. The shuttle will take members of the Vassar community to and from a number of spots throughout Poughkeepsie. The service will initially start as a “pilot program” to gauge campus response and determine how much demand for the service actually exists on campus.

The group that has spearheaded this project is the Campus Community Advisory Committee (CCAC), which was created only last spring to increase the presence of Vassar in the community. The shuttle project is one of its first official acts to improve and increase the degree of student involvement in the city.

According to CCAC co-chair Jim Challey, the committee found that the lack of transportation options “was the biggest obstacle to student involvement in the community.”

After investigating and considering the options, the CCAC fixed on a regular shuttle service as the best solution to the transportation issue. A survey taken last semester by the CCAC and submitted to the Vassar Student Association found that 86 percent of respondents think that “better, reliable transportation to local areas” was “somewhat important to very important,” and 71.2 percent said they were “likely to very likely” to use a shuttle bus to Poughkeepsie.

With the pilot program, the work of the CCAC finally comes to fruition. But the service as it currently stands may not meet all the desires of the student population for off-campus transportation. Respondents to the CCAC survey indicated that entertainment, eating out, exploring, shopping and socializing are more important reasons for wanting off-campus transportation than volunteering. Respondents also said they were more likely to use the shuttle service on weekends rather than during the week.

The tentative plan for the service has the shuttle running only Monday through Friday, and it focuses on more locations where many students volunteer or do field work. According to the CCAC, the shuttle will leave from Main Circle on the hour and head to the Poughkeepsie Middle School, then on to the Family Partnership Center, to the intersection of Main St. and Garden St., to the Adriance Library, and back to the middle school before returning to campus.

Challey, who is also the director of STS, said that a number of factors went into the CCAC’s choices for the current plan. The desire to keep the cost down and to maintain frequency and reliability were the most important factors. The committee wanted a route that could be completed in a half-hour to ensure that the shuttle could run often and complete its route quickly.

“The primary thought behind the initial route was to get as much coverage in the greater Poughkeepsie area as could reasonably be reached in a 30-minute loop,” said CCAC co-chair Andrew Meade. “The committee made the decision that it was preferable to run every half-hour rather than every hour, to eliminate potentially long waits for pickups in the city.”

The shuttle does not aim to serve all the transportation needs of the Vassar community, but does hope “to accommodate student community action and community work service placements, and also provide access for all students to downtown Poughkeepsie,” Meade said.

The CCAC said that if the response to the pilot program is positive, the service may expand to accommodate more of what students want.