This semester, the University has made changes to its shuttle bus service.
The shuttle bus service, run by the Division of Student Affairs, provides students with transportation between the Queens campus, off-campus apartments located on Union Turnpike, and the Kew Gardens and Jamaica subway stations. It also provides transportation between the Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island campuses.
A stop was added the Jamaica Station shuttle service, which operates between the Queens campus, the 169th Street F train station and the Jamaica Long Island Railroad station. Jackie Lochrie, associate dean for student services, said the shuttle now picks up students at the new Henley Road dorm, stopping at the corner of Homelawn Street and Highland Avenue.
The Jamaica Station shuttle operates hourly between 6:30 a.m. and 10:45 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Sophomore Kishon Kuruvilla said he regularly takes the Jamaica shuttle to the Henley Road complex.
“The shuttle system is a great help for the off-campus students,” he said.
But Kuruvilla said he thinks the shuttle buses need to run more frequently.
“There is only one bus every hour. It needs to be one every half-hour,” he said.
Sophomore Anna Henebeng voiced a similar opinion, saying that the shuttle schedule to Henley Road is not accommodating for students’ class schedules.
“I have a class at 3:05 and in order to go to this class I either have to take the 2:05 shuttle and sit on campus for an hour or take the 3:10 shuttle and be late for class,” she said.
A new late-night shuttle service has also been implemented this semester for students living in the off-campus dorms. Students at the Seton, Depaul, Goethals, Coolidge and Henley Road residences can now take a van provided by Public Safety from the Queens campus to the off-campus dorms. The late-night van service operates seven nights a week from 11 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. and departs Gate 6 at least twice an hour.
Henebeng said she thinks the public safety service is a great way for students to travel back to their dorms.
“The late-night shuttle was probably the best thing public safety could have ever implemented to avoid all the late-night calls people would have made to bring them back to Henley [Road],” she said.
The weekend shuttle bus service, that ran Friday through Sunday and brought students from the Queens campus to Times Square was canceled this semester.
Lochrie said there was not enough demand from the students for the weekend shuttle service.
“We evaluated the number of students that used the weekend shuttle to Manhattan. It was determined that this was not a service widely used,” she said. “In fact, on many of the trips to Manhattan it ran empty.”
Lochrie said that the funds previously assigned to the weekend shuttle are now being used for student programming.
“We were able to redirect the funds used to operate the weekend shuttle back to student engagement and programming so that more students can benefit from these resources,” she said.
