Crimson and Gold Connection; Steve Erwin

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection. My name is Dustin Tribeur. Today we have the vice president of Student Life, Dr. Steve Irwin. Dr. Welcome to the Crimson and Gold Connection. It's great to be here. Now we could talk about numerous things. And really your purpose here is to make life better for students on campus. Make things just easy all the way around. And one of the big issues dating back to prehistoric times I believe is parking. That's right. And really something we've you you have done here the last couple of years is introduce the gorilla shuttle. Yeah we realized that to continue to build parking spaces when we have other spaces that are sitting idle and unused even though they might be in more remote locations of the campus really didn't make a lot of sense. So for years we had talked about a shuttle even dating back to the construction of the tech center and felt like it was time to try to move forward on that. And this began as am I correct last year and it's been doing pretty well for this inaugural year. It has. We really went into last year in an experimental pilot basis. We collaborated with

C-CAP and their transportation services. We had partnered with them over the years really to allow students to be able to ride the general public transportation for free by helping support the cost of that and we recognized that they had the equipment drivers everything we needed so we approached them about possibly doing this with us and they were eager partners and have been great. Now do they still help out or they do they're still our provider and as we had a first year run that seemed successful we thought that it could be even more successful if we added a second bus and so we did that and doubled down so to speak and that made the route go quicker. We were able to add some extra stops more into the heart of campus and we've seen our ridership increase like we thought it would. And that's that's always been a big deal even back when I was on campus. You went back in the early 2000s is you know you got campus here and then you got all the way about a mile away you have all the parking. My solution to that was I lived too far away to

just ride my bike so I'd truck in with my pickup truck having my bike in the back jump out of the back park and go you know and while now you can you can park and you can hop on a shuttle and then you can get to the tech center or the main campus or just about anywhere on campus now. Yeah we really viewed it as a service that ought to serve a lot of different purposes. We want people to use more remote lots they're empty you can pull in quick have the shuttle go along those areas and get on it and come to the heart of campus and then the day go back. We also hope that faculty and staff would use it oftentimes you know cars are moving across campus and taking up parking spaces in different areas whether it be the rec center or the tech center staff coming to the heart of campus or vice versa and with having the shuttle hopefully they'll leave their cars parked and and not essentially occupy two spaces over time but you know quickly move across the campus to where they need to go and back. Now can you explain how this works do you need a ticket is it free just park and you hop on and

yeah it's it's really free to anyone that's on on the campus faculty staff students and even visitors really there's no ID required or anything like that it's just meant to serve the internal function of the campus and so really anyone that would get on and have need to move from one place to another across the campus is welcome to use it. All right and it runs from 730 AM to 230 PM. Actually we we were able to expand it this year and I hope we've got our website updated now to 330 PM. We had originally last year it had been from 730 to 230 with just a single bus running. We recognized an opportunity by having two buses to stagger their schedule just a little bit and from one will start at 730 in the morning and run for an hour by itself then the other one will join it and it'll run till 230 both of them together so we'll have two buses from 830 to 230 and then the last hour from 230 to 330 a single bus will run again because obviously the the flow

is less and is against what our hope was by doubling the buses that would quicken the route increase ridership and we're seeing that already just 10 days or so into classes and how quick is it how long would you have to wait at a stop to wait for our next bus. We think about five six five to seven minutes again depending on traffic that the buses get involved in and the the amount of students getting on and off that can take some time. We have I believe about 13 stops right now we did expand by three and those go down into the more in the heart of campus near the student center entrance and on the south side to the grubs hall I'm sorry whites at hall and the residence hall areas but hopefully they keep opposite each other on the route to quicken things. Oh good we have a couple more minutes here and we were kind of talk a little bit before about game day protocol and would like to speak a little bit about that. Well of course our first game

this year is on a Thursday night and actually by the time this is aired that'll be past us but we did have to make some adjustments for that with game day parking and in order to accommodate that we up the number of shuttles that will be running that day we're going to implement two additional buses that run just from the library area to a couple of remote lots that we'd like people to use in the Bicknell Center and the the baseball softball complex. And that should alleviate a lot of the congestion and just the traffic on a normal football game day. We hope it does yes and you know we have such great crowds that we have to go into sort of a special mode to manage all the traffic and all the people that are here. Now are those still the two the two same buses do you have bringing anybody else? No we're actually using the two athletic carry all buses that teams actually go on they aren't being used that day to transport any teams out of town so we're able to utilize them. We actually talked to C-CAP about upping their numbers and they

were willing to do that but then since we already had the resources here and the drivers available we decided to just run it ourselves. Now you've also added some more parking spaces this summer is that correct? Yes even though we hope to slow down on the addition of additional parking spaces and see our existing lots used more efficiently. We are continuing to add parking spaces in some areas just on the very north side of campus across Williams Street and for a number of years we'd had some smaller gravel lots that had some intervening properties that were still being occupied by property owners and homes and we had an opportunity to purchase one last home in between two lots and join those into a new revised and layout lot that actually made it more efficient and gave us I think about 30 new spots the combined lot provides nearly 90 spots again in a nicer layout with new entrances and exits. Well I can definitely tell the difference in the

team 11-12 years since I've been here. Dr. Stever when you and your team have been doing a great job not just with parking with everything on campus and thank you doctor for coming in and speaking with us on crimson and gold connection. Thanks it's been great to be here. I am Dustin Triber. This is Dr. Steve Irwin. Thank you very much for listening to crimson and gold connection.