Park and Ride location moved

Getting to class has never been so controversial.\nThe Bloomington Transit's Park and Ride program is scheduled to move locations from Bryan Park to the Winslow Sports Complex starting Sept. 6, much to the distress of students who use the transit service and to residents in the neighborhoods that surround the complex. The Bloomington Board of Park Commissioners will vote on the change Tuesday at 3 p.m. in City Hall.\nBloomington Transit general manager Lew May said Park and Ride was implemented 12 years ago to serve as a way for students who lived off campus to get to class. But in recent months, the residents adjacent to Bryan Park have expressed disapproval about the noise, pollution and safety of the transit program that runs past their homes daily every 10 minutes.\nHowever, the residents by the Winslow Sports Park are voicing concerns that echo those who live by Bryan Park. \n"This area is already a very densely populated place," said Rose Mahern, president of the Moss Creek Village Homeowners Association. "We love the students, but the roads were not built for this many cars."\nMahern said the community already deals with extra traffic because of Bloomington South High School and is worried the extra carbon monoxide emitted by the buses will damage the vegetation in the area. \nIU Student Association President senior Tyson Chastain said he has received numerous e-mails from concerned students about the changes to the program.\n"They've been saying to me, 'Tyson, we rely on this. This is something I use to go to class,'" Chastain said.\nBloomington resident Buff Brown, a transport air quality specialist for the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, said a survey of the students using the Park and Ride program was conducted last year by the city-planning department found that 65 percent of Park and Ride users live on existing bus routes.\nMay said it's true some students who use the service are on existing routes but the Park and Ride system is about convenience, and it may not be convenient to use those routes.\n"I didn't take the shuttle because I'm lazy," graduate student Donna Drucker said. "I took it because it was conveniently close to my apartment and ran frequently enough to accommodate my irregular schedule as a graduate student."\nPark and Ride will run from the Winslow Sports Complex until spring break, when it will move back to Bryan Park to avoid the increased sports traffic Winslow experiences in the spring. The venue change would mean a 17-minute bus ride to campus from the Winslow Sports Complex, as opposed to the seven-minute bus ride from Bryan Park. Also, there will be a 20-minute gap between buses instead of a 10-minute gap.\nMay said the switch to the Winslow Sports Complex is only a temporary solution, but it is one Mahern doesn't understand.\n"It seems logical and sensible to keep it at Bryan Park for one more year, not just to compound the problem by moving it to another neighborhood," Mahern said.\nChastain expressed frustration that this decision was talked about in public forums during the summer, in a transit board meeting Aug. 3 and a park board meeting Wednesday, when the majority of students were not in Bloomington to attend the meetings.\n"I think if this issue had been brought up when the students were here, it would have been resolved easily," Chastain said. "If they were worried about the buses driving too many times on small streets, we might have been able to work something out." \nDrucker said the change will not be beneficial.\n"If there were real problems with the shuttle, the Bloomington Transit should face them with the help and voices of its riders," Drucker said, "not just move it from one neighborhood to another without the input of anyone except homeowners who don't use it."\n-- Contact senior writer Kathleen Quilligan at kquillig@indiana.edu.