As the excitement for holiday breaks approach, the Undergraduate Student Government hopes to make the holiday traveling process easier for students to and from all four ASU campuses.
USG has entered the early stages for providing shuttle rides between Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and ASU’s campuses throughout future holiday breaks.
The student government plans to use the already-active intercampus shuttle system, which transports students to and from the Tempe, Polytechnic, downtown Phoenix and West campuses.
Tempe USG President Brandon Bishop said that the process is in its early stages and that there are many milestones to achieve before this idea becomes a reality.
“It’s a long process — sadly nothing that we can just snap our fingers and say we want this done,” Bishop said. “We have to figure out a full-length plan, and there’s a lot of different moving parts in regards to all of our other initiatives and this initiative.”
The final goal is to provide this service to all on-campus students. With that, other USG presidents are looking into what it would take to come up with a solid proposal.
USG Polytechnic President Ryan O’Hara wants to make sure the plan is suitable for his campus' constituents and that students at Polytechnic will actually maximize the service.
“There’s especially a need for it at Polytechnic, since we are way out there in Mesa," O’Hara said. “But we want to make sure we’re making decisions based on data and that there is a large student interest in the idea.”
Funding for the plan is also in its early stages. However, Bishop mentioned previously that funding this idea would likely come from the carry-forward money that each campus was allocated at the end of the previous 2015-16 school year.
“If it does require more money, that is going to have to be a conversation we (USG) have later on as a group,” Bishop said.
The student government must provide a proposal that the ASU Parking and Transit Advisory Board (PTS) will agree is financially and socially viable. PTS is a University-affiliated committee that works directly with parking and transit to address parking and shuttle issues.
JC Porter, the board's commuter services assistant director, said he thinks shuttle service goal will be a difficult task to complete.
"It'd be hard to run a shuttle (for ASU) for less than what the light rail or an Uber would cost," Porter said. "Running the shuttle is pretty costly, unless you get a lot of people on one bus, which would bring the cost per ride down."
Although Porter said he believes that cost could restrict the proposal's success, he's not ruling it out.
"I know a lot of other universities do this," Porter said.
Information technology graduate student Amit Parasa thinks the shuttles would be an excellent resource for his fellow ASU students as far as expenses are concerned.
“When I was coming back (to Arizona), the Uber's were costing $20 for a ride when I was only about two miles away from the airport,” Parasa said. “The shuttles would be a great idea, if ASU could do that.”
The next Parking and Transit Advisory Board meeting will take place Oct. 21 at 9 a.m. The location has yet to be determined.
Reach the reporter at vkeys@asu.edu or follow @VKeys1231 on Twitter.
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