DAN QUAGLIANA
News Editor
In order to better facilitate transport between Fredonia and Buffalo, the university’s ticket office has added a new transportation option between the two locations.
In an email sent out by Jefferson Westwood, the Director of Rockefeller Arts Center and the interim manager of the ticket office, it was stated that, “Executive Transportation Service of WNY will run one bus each Saturday[,] starting May 4 through the end of the semester[,] and one bus each morning of finals week, starting on Wed., May 15.”
The rationale for this new bus service, according to the email, is that “Coach USA has reduced its daily schedule from five buses per day down to just one.” This had been the norm until “fairly recently,” according to Westwood.
“For the last several weeks, it has been just one bus per day in each direction,” he said. “And the company can’t tell how soon they expect to return service to ‘normal.’ Sunday service (two buses per day in each direction) has not been affected, only Monday through Saturday.”
Coach USA is an independent busing company that runs scheduled buses from Jamestown to Buffalo multiple times a day.
It stops at multiple different places on its route, the SUNY Fredonia campus being one of them.
The addition of this new busing service was caused by “a general labor shortage in our region,” Westwood said.
“Using an allocation from the student transportation fee, we are offering this service at $25 per trip,” Westwood’s email explained. “Although this is more than the Coach USA price, it is a discount of almost 30% off our normal [University-managed] shuttle service price. Please note that tickets must be purchased at the Campus Ticket Office at least 48 hours in advance of departure and that these tickets are non-refundable.”
The Ticket Office says that this is only the second year that portions of the transportation fee have been used to help fund services that they produce for students.
Historically, that fee has only been used to fund campus-facilitated transportation, such as the park-and-ride shuttle. The University is not funding this new bus service — rather, its stopping on campus is merely a courtesy of the Executive Transportation Service of WNY.
Westwood is unsure of how many students will use this new service, calling it an “experiment.”
“I think that during finals week, we will probably hit at least the four-person minimum, especially for students trying to make airline connections,” he said. “The 6:29 p.m. bus that Coach USA [offers] does not get to downtown Buffalo until about 8:00 p.m. and then it’s another half hour to the airport. Given the requirement to be at the airport at least 90 minutes before flight time, all the planes will have left.
This means that if Coach USA were a student’s only way to get to the airport, they would have to go up the night before and spend the night in a hotel. I just think our students deserve better options than this,” Westwood said.