DSG sponsors weekend bus service to Southpoint

Duke Student Government will soon be starting a bimonthly bus service to Southpoint Mall and Target on Saturdays.

The buses will depart from West Campus from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. every other Saturday starting March 21 until the end of the academic year. The project—which was introduced by DSG senators for Durham and regional affairs Jessica Reese, a junior, and Gwen Geng, a freshman—seeks to expand pre-existing off-campus transportation opportunities to all students.

“I was on my way to Southpoint to see a movie with an advisor and I realized that I hadn’t been to Southpoint at all in the past semester because it’s hard to get there,” Reese said.

Geng explained that the only way she could get to off-campus locations regularly was with the International House, which organizes trips into Durham. However, the excursions are only open to international students and the scheduling can be tricky to work with, she said.

Geng and Reese conducted several surveys to gauge student interest before presenting the project to the DSG Senate as a budgetary statute,

“We got a lot of great suggestions, like adding the service to Transloc and adding a third bus to a farmer’s market,” Reese said.

The bus to the farmer's market was proposed as part of the budgetary statute, but after Senate debate, it was removed from the statute, reducing the price of the overall bus services by a third.

“When we were running [the idea] past David [Robertson, a senior and vice president of Durham and regional affairs], he made us aware that we might run into some difficulty in Senate just because of the price of the project,” said Reese.

The $6,210 cost of the service, taken from the DSG surplus fund, covers chartering Duke buses, Transloc integration and other small administrative costs associated with the project.

The service will run through the end of the year, but Reese explained that it is still in the early stages and that they are looking to find out if and what times of day students use the service.

“It’s like a trial run,” Reese said. “We’re using this post-spring break school time to figure out when and how many people actually use the service, and then we’re going to adjust it next semester to reflect those times.”

The Duke Parking and Transportation Office was very receptive to the proposal, Geng said.

“Parking and Transportation really wanted to make something like this happen, but a lack of funding made it difficult for them, so we’re glad DSG will be able to pay for this and take it on,” she said.

As long as fees are paid and drivers are available, the Parking and Transportation Office is glad to allow groups to charter buses and drivers for various projects to benefit students and other members of the Duke community, said Alison Carpenter, transit planner and transportation demand manager for Duke Parking and Transportation.

“We do what people ask, as long as we have the buses and drivers to do it,” Carpenter said.

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