IU Transportation Services survey travel behavior

Freshmen Yadira Aguilar and Penny Howard rely on the IU campus buses to travel to their classes and to their dorms. Although they both appreciate having transportation on campus, they said they often lose their patience waiting for their bus to arrive.

“We have been waiting for the D-bus for forever,” Aguilar said as she and Howard waited at the bus stop on Seventh Street.

To learn about how people travel to campus, IU Transportation Services e-mailed a survey on Oct. 13 to IU students, employees and faculty.

Survey responses will contribute to improving IU transportation, said Kent McDaniel, executive director of IU Transportation Services.

“We hope to learn more about travel patterns,” he said. “And we need to understand the patterns to predict the need and to improve or design in the future.”

The survey is a joint effort of two companies that have contracts with IU – JJR and Gorove/Slade Associates, McDaniel said. JJR is a national company that focuses on landscaping and urban design. Gorove/Slade Associates provide transportation and parking consolation.

Gorove/Slade’s Senior Transportation Engineer in Chicago, Chuck Teuer, said there have been about 10,000 responses to the survey so far.  

However, students are able to take the survey multiple times, as the link is opened to them even after they take the survey. Teuer said he is going to look into that bug.

“We would like to have only one response per person,” he laughed.
Although there is no set time for the survey to end, responses have slowed down, so the survey might become unavailable “any day now,” he said.

The survey contains questions concerning the participants’ mode of transportation on campus, when they’re on campus and if they own a parking permit for their car. Teuer said answers to these questions will help with the long-range plan for transportation on the IU campus.

“We hope to learn which various modes of travel people prefer,” he said. “(The survey) is designed to get an idea of what people want.”

IU Parking Operations Manager Doug Porter said he hopes the survey will help parking operations better serve students and employees who use parking operation’s services.

“It might give us a better idea of what they expect, what they’re looking for and what we aren’t providing,” he said.

McDaniel and Porter said the current IU transportation trends haven’t changed much during this semester.

McDaniel said there has been a slight decrease in students riding the IU buses so far this semester, after IU Campus Bus Service reported this summer of having a record-breaking ridership for the 2007-2008 school year.

IU Campus Bus Service cut back on some of its services starting in May, such as cutting the E-route so that it doesn’t travel down College Mall Road, because of rising gas and upkeep costs, McDaniel said.

Both Aguilar and Howard said they didn’t take the survey.

“I just didn’t have time,” Aguilar said.