The university hopes to reduce the demand for its buses by 20,000 rides a week.
NEW BRUNSWICK -- Anyone who has seen the College Avenue or George Street bus stops during peak hours knows exactly what's wrong with Rutgers University's notorious bus system, university President Robert Barchi said.
Students swarming to each approaching bus are sometimes forced to wait for a second or even a third bus to arrive before there's enough room to board. And once they get on, students are often forced to stand shoulder-to-shoulder while riding to class at the university's sprawling New Brunswick-Piscataway campus.
"Students have to get on those buses sometimes two, three, four times a day to get where they are going," said Barchi, the latest president hoping to the alleviate the decades-old problem that causes daily headache for students.
But rather than adding more routes to address it longstanding busing mess, Rutgers is taking a different approach this fall. It's attempting to reduce student need for the bus system, Barchi said.
In an attempt to lessen demand for buses by about 8 percent, or 20,000 rides per week, Rutgers delayed decisions on student housing, moved more than 100 class sections to different buildings and even made personal phone calls to about a dozen students who had particularly travel-heavy class schedules.
The cost-neutral changes should mean less scrambling to catch a bus and more seats available during the ride, university officials said.
"It doesn't sound like much," Barchi said of the 8 percent change. "But that's a lot at peak times."
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Overcrowded buses have long been a chief complaint among Rutgers students. Being late to class because a bus was too full is a common example of the "RU screw," a term students use to describe ways their university is seemingly making life more difficult for them.
But the buses are necessary, especially for first-year students, because classes and social events are held all across the campus, which is split in half by the Raritan River and spans more than 5 miles from end to end.
In searching for a solution, the university analyzed recent data on where its first-year students were living and where those students were taking courses, said Antonio Calcado, senior vice president for institutional planning and operations.
In many cases, the university found it could cut down on bus rides by moving sections of popular classes to campuses with more student housing rather than transporting students those classes, he said.
"Some of our courses were just at the wrong place at the wrong time," Calcado said. "If the vast majority of our freshman students are sitting on the Livingston campus, what we wanted to do was offer the bigger courses that all first year students take on the Livingston campus."
Similarly, Rutgers waited to finalize its housing assignments for first-year students until the university had students' course schedules and could see where they needed to go for their classes.
And if the university saw that a student, perhaps unknowingly, scheduled a busing nightmare, it reached out to try to fix it, Barchi said.
"We actually had to go and call students and say 'Look, you are getting ready for a schedule that will make you make four bus transfers. Let us show you how you do that in two,'" Barchi said.
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The university won't know until the end of the semester whether the initiative was a success, Barchi said.
While some buses rumbled away with room to spare on a recent morning, others remained crowded and signs of the persistent bus problems were still evident.
Ariel Ahdoot, a senior hoping to catch a ride from the College Avenue campus to the Livingston campus, tried going to two different bus stops, he said.
After seeing the crowd at the Student Activity Center on George Street, Ahdoot walked to the stop outside the College Avenue Gym. There, he was stonewalled at the bus door because it was already packed.
As the bus drove away without him, Ahdoot said he had yet to see any reduction in demand for the buses he needs.
"It's possible that maybe some of them have been reduced," said Ahdoot, walking to fetch his car. "For the ones that I have been on, not so much."
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