Spending long hours studying at the library and leaving the building late at night poses a variety of safety issues for some students, and therefore, the Library Shuttle Service will provide students with an alternative.

A new service, created as a result of a joint effort between the N.C. State Libraries and Student Body President Will Quick, has been put into place to address some of these issues and make students feel safer as they leave the library.

The new Library Shuttle Service, which began service on Feb. 11, operates from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. Sunday through Thursday nights and from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Friday nights. The six-passenger electric cart picks up and drops off passengers from the Hillsborough Street Wolfline stop, circles the perimeter of D.H. Hill Library and drops off students at the Patterson Hall parking lot.

“We felt that the service was important because there were concerns about student safety and public safety from people coming from one side of the library to the other,” Chelcy Boyer, the interim director of Friends of the Library, said. “This service reflects the University’s commitment to student safety.”

A survey that the Hillsborough Street Partnership trustee Mitch Danforth conducted found that general safety was one of the biggest concerns students had about Hillsborough Street, according to a Technician article published Feb. 20.

“Safety on Hillsborough Street could best be divided into three categories- pedestrian, vehicular and night safety,” Danforth, a senior in civil engineering said. “I think the biggest category is night safety, and by that I mean a general feeling of security.”

Boyer said that the shuttle would help those trying to get from one side of the library to the other feel more secure and not have to worry about some of the safety issues. Boyer added that while the shuttle currently operates with only one six passenger cart, increasing the number of carts is not out of the question.

“I’d think that if we were getting so many requests for the service that we needed more seats for students, we would consider adding more carts,” Boyer said. “However, that hasn’t been the case so far.”

Quick said that the shuttle service was not a part of his original platform, but came about because of financial concerns.

“One of my big platform issues was opening Erdahl-Cloyd wing at the Library so students wouldn’t have to walk so far at night. It can be an unsafe environment on Hillsborough Street at night.”

According to Quick, after looking into the issue and determining what costs would be involved, he and the N.C. State Libraries came up with a compromise.

“We came up with a compromise that we would run a shuttle service, so that students would have that available to them to give them that extra feeling of safety,” Quick said.