This is not the first time the D route has been discontinued, said Perry Maull, operations manager for Campus Bus Services.
Before the 2007-08 school year there hadn’t been a D bus in quite a while, he said.
“The D has been sort of on again, off again, on again, off again over the years,” he said.
Sophomore Emma Sperry, who lived in Teter last year, rode the D route frequently to get where she needed to go on campus.
“My biggest problem with the D route last year is that there weren’t enough buses,” she said. “Everyone’s just stuffed on the bus.”
The E route will have the same number of buses as last year’s D route: two buses in the morning, with the addition of one more at 12:30 p.m.
She added that she likely wouldn’t be riding the bus often.
The E route, while still going all the way to Evermann apartments for its recovery point, will be looping around campus and is the only campus bus to go by Willkie Residence Center and ?Forest Quad.
On the weekend, the E bus will also go to College Mall.
The D route, the logistics of which have often been problematic for the Campus Bus Service, was considered obsolete by the Student Transportation Board last April at the board meeting.
The recovery point, the stop where the bus often sits for 10 to 15 minutes, has been changed multiple times since the 2007 school year to account for construction and, most recently, the addition of a bike lane down Third Street, Maull said.
“We’ve always had a problem, because it was a loop, where do you take its recovery point?” Maull said.
The Campus Bus Service had the added problem of construction that will begin this year on Jordan Avenue near Third Street, and now that the A bus is back to its pre-Hodge Hall construction route, there will be more buses on the same streets, he said.
“That’s when we started tossing around, ‘OK, can we sort of solve a lot of different things by just putting the E route going down Rose, and then do we need to have the D route continue?’” Maull said.
The decision was made at the Student Transportation Meeting in April to discontinue the D route, and it’ll take some time for the Campus Bus Service to see how the change will affect ridership, he said.
“We’ll have to see what ridership does,” he said. “In general, I think ridership is going to go up, because the A route is going back to its old pattern.”
