NC State has a huge campus so it is necessary to have buses on campus for students to get to classes during the week. A high number of students live on campus as well. Some of the residence halls are located in very central areas but other on-campus housing is scattered near the outskirts of campus.

During the week, adequate bus service is provided from all corners of campus, including to Centennial Campus. During the weekends, especially on Sundays, bus service is drastically cut back.

I understand having fewer buses running on weekends because most students may not need as much access to campus buildings. However, due to the number of classes students take, weekend study sessions are a must, so there need to be bus routes to the libraries.

On Sundays, there is only one bus running, Route 8, that is not accessible to most places on campus and does not benefit most of the student body. The route extends to a small part of Centennial Campus, Avent Ferry, and only stops by Witherspoon Student Center and Carmichael gym on Central Campus. The bus running also ends its route by 6 p.m. which is still pretty early by most college students’ standards.

Many students have to get to the library on Sundays. The weekends seem so long, but by the end students are scrambling to get all their assignments and studying done by Monday morning. For most students on campus, though, no buses are running to enable them to easily access the library.

Students living in Wolf Village have a 25-minute walk to get to D. H. Hill on Sundays and Hunt Library is three miles away, which is backbreaking to walk lugging all their textbooks. Personally, I weighed my book bag one day and it was 26.5 pounds. That is a lot of weight to carry around on your shoulders when walking all over campus.

A good portion of students also have jobs on campus and just because it is the weekend doesn’t mean that they don’t have to get work. Hill of Beans coffee shop is open until 1 a.m. on Sundays, which means student workers are walking back to their places of residence after 1:30 in the morning which can be a huge safety issue depending on how far away “home” is for them.

Another issue with the lack of service on weekends is that the Wolfline is also open to the public. Part of the routes run through areas slightly off campus where residents of Raleigh use the buses to get to work or other places near campus. Living in or near a city, some people opt not to have cars so not only are students on campus hindered but other members of the community are as well.

Transportation may argue that since parking on campus is not restricted by parking permit during the weekends, students can just drive wherever they need to. Not every student has a car on campus though, and even if every student did have a car, not all would be able to park on campus because NC State’s parking passes are in short supply.

NCSU Transportation needs to take the factors I have discussed into consideration and possibly add at least one more route on Sundays so students have access to more parts of campus on the weekends.