NC State’s transportation systems, which can be difficult for new students to navigate, are undergoing some changes within the next year which could affect the ways that many students travel and park on its various campuses.
To help avoid confusion, here are some things to be aware of as the new semester begins, according to NC State’s Transit Manager Kim Paylor.
Wolfline changes
Route 2, Hillsborough Street, has been realigned and will no longer serve Beryl Road, Pylon Drive, Cameron Street and Faucette Drive. A new stop has been added at the intersection of Enterprise Street and Clark Avenue as well as on Sullivan Drive as the bus approaches Wolf Village.
Route 6, Carter Finley, will be realigned to serve Beryl Road and Pylon Drive. The Pylon Road stop will become a time point. Route 6 will only serve the Vet School going one direction, inbound to campus.
Route 7, Wolflink Shuttle, will now have larger buses, 40 feet long, to help address capacity issues.
Route 11, Village Link, will now serve the Varsity lot both inbound and outbound and will now stop along Western Boulevard and Kent Road.
Wolfprowl service start time will change from 9 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights to 10 p.m. on those nights.
The construction on Hillsborough Street has caused a lot of stagnation for commuters, but Christine Klein, public communication specialist for NCSU Transportation, said that the university is working “very closely” with the city of Raleigh to minimize the delays and communicate them to the public so that they aren’t caught off guard.
One of the major limitations to the Wolfline buses is that all of the routes flow in the same direction, as opposed to UNC-Chapel Hill, for example, where buses go in both directions. This creates an issue when, for example, a student takes the bus from D. H. Hill Library to the Belltower, because they will then have to walk the back to the library or take the bus all the way around the campus.
The problems with two-way routes are turning radius and safety, which Klein said has existed “since the beginning of time.” Forty-foot buses can carry more passengers than 30-foot buses but have a much wider turning radius, and in an urban environment like Raleigh with a large number of people in relatively tight spaces, there isn’t enough room for these larger buses to operate.
Klein said that UNC-CH’s bus system and NC State’s are “apples and oranges” when it comes to transportation because the Chapel Hill city bus system is the same as the UNC-CH’s, so it has to serve a more diverse group of riders, whereas Wolfline’s ridership is more uniform because it is divided among two other public transportation systems operating in Raleigh: GoRaleigh in the city and GoTriangle in the Triangle region.
Full Wolfline service begins the day before classes start on Aug. 17, according to Klein. She said that this is to allow students who arrive early, most commonly international students or others who are unfamiliar with the area, time to get used to the bus routes, though there is always demand for this early service to be extended.
“We always have to do the cost-benefit analysis because adding more service increases the cost and the cost has to be paid for,” Klein said. “We have to do a hard look at that and determine [what the best solution is] because if we give people who are coming early more [early] service then we have to ask for more money on the student transit fee — that’s a big deal.”
Patrick Flanary, assistant director for finance for Transportation, called the struggle between providing the best service to students while keeping costs down a “balancing act.”
“People want service everywhere, and we can’t because we can’t raise the costs on everybody to help just a few people,” Flanary said.
Fee increases are highly reliant on recommendations from Student Government, though their opinion is not final, according to Flanary.
“They get to weigh in their opinion, they’re one of about five groups who do, but [student input] holds a lot of weight because that’s really who it’s for,” Flanary said. “If they don’t like [a proposal for a fee increase] or they want to reduce it — it doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen, but it carries a lot of weight.”
Parking Changes
More pay spaces are being added to the Dan Allen Carriageway, the loading and parking area across the street from Witherspoon Student Center, to provide more room for visitors and students’ services. Some RE (resident) spaces on Cates Avenue will be converted to C (employee) spaces to make up for the losses in the Dan Allen Carriageway.
Those with electric cars who intend to use the charging stations on campus will now be required to register for a new EV (electrical vehicle) parking permit in addition to a campus parking permit. The permit will cost $120 which will help to maintain and improve the current charge stations. EV users will be limited to four hours of access to charging stations between the hours of 7 a.m. and 5 p.m., though there will be no limit to charging station usage outside of that span.
Klein said that even though the abuse of the charging station hours was rare, Transportation wants to discourage excessive use of the stations as electric cars grow in popularity.
“What we were seeing was people who would have a ‘P’ permit which is out on the perimeter and they would come in and they would park their electric vehicle at that charging station and say ‘Yahoo I’ve got a great parking spot all day long,’ even though we would say it’s a four-hour limit,” Klein said. “So we are getting serious about that.”
The university wrote just under 40,000 tickets in the 2015-16 school year, up from just under 38,000 tickets the previous year, according to Klein. Of the 40,000 given this most past year, 16,600 were for parking in a permit zone without the required permit, Klein said.
Parking tickets range from $5 penalties to $250 for any violations listed on the “Rules and Fines” page of the university’s Transportation website.
If it seems like the university’s parking attendants are picking on you, take comfort in the fact that the university does not benefit in any way by giving out tickets. In fact, the university loses money every time it writes a ticket, which ultimately results in an increase to every student’s transit fees, according to Flanary.
The university collected $485,578 for the last academic year but can only keep $97,116 which isn’t enough to cover the cost of writing and adjudicating tickets, nor the enforcement process, Flanary said. The rest of that money is funneled through the state legislature into Wake County Public Schools.
