At the beginning of every school year you are bound to find confused, new students on campus. I mean really, the place is huge and honestly- some of the buildings’ layouts are not all that intuitive. Harrelson hall has those strange alternating staircases taking you to every other floor so if you get on the wrong one you’d be totally lost on the wrong floor. Dabney and Cox run together making it all too easy to walk into another building without even noticing it; and the worst offender of all is Carmichael Gymnasium with its labyrinthine design making it impossible for a stranger to its realms to navigate. Of course, most of these puzzles can be figured out in the first few weeks of being on campus. However, one thing manages continuously to screw up peoples’ daily school lives—the Wolfline bus system.
Now, I appreciate the Wolfine a great deal, especially as an engineer since I have to hop back and forth between Centennial and Main Campus. A free bus servicing all of campus is pretty much essential to a school our size. However, if you are going to provide a system for students to plan their schedules around, it might be a good idea to give students prior warning before the Office of Transportation goes and changes the bus routes and schedules.
On the first day of the semester I had just gotten out of class on Centennial Campus and was walking over to Oval Drive where I had left my bike. When I got out to the big walkway in front of Engineering Building Two I was surprised to see more people standing around waiting than I had ever seen before. Of course all of those people were expecting the number 3 bus to come and take them back to Main Campus. Little did they know that the University had axed the number three route and even if they waited there all day no one was coming to give them a ride.
Why did not a single person in the crowd know about the route change? Was it because they’re dumb or maybe they were too lazy to check the Wolfline website? Dumb and lazy don’t really sound like characteristics of N.C . State engineers, so what was the problem? The problem is the information was not streamlined to the students like information about bus routes should be. It wasn’t until 2:18 pm later that day that an email was sent out informing students of the route change. How hard would it have been to send that email one day earlier before it caused headaches for those who needed to get to class on a campus two miles away.
This instance causes concern for the future as well. With all of the construction going on around campus who knows how many times the buses around main campus will have to go alternate routes and not keep their normal stops. When that happens are they going to wait until it’s too late to give everyone a heads up again? I certainly hope not. It’s not like they don’t have every student’s email address and it’s not like it takes more than a sentence telling us we might want to check the schedule out. While it is true that you can check the schedules online does anyone really have the time to check it every time they need to get on a bus? No way. All it would take to save us all some serious headache and hassle is a simple e-mail a day before any changes happen. Do that, NCSU Transportation , and you will have at least my thanks.
