Despite the dinnertime rush, students gathered in the Great Hall Monday night to air concerns about campus parking and transportation in a town hall meeting sponsored by Duke Student Government.
Students' main concerns were after-hours and special event parking and the convenience and efficacy of the campus bus system. Cathy Reeve, director of parking and transportation, and Peter Murphy, assistant director of transit, were on hand to hear students' concerns and also to point out improvements that have been made over the past few years.
Reeve pointed out that the current van and bus services system has existed for decades, and improvements have generally been made through a "layered approach."
"We're stepping back now," Reeve said. "We want to peel things back to see what the transportation system needs to be here at Duke."
Murphy said Duke Transit serves 17,000 passengers per day and outlined some of the changes that have been made over the past year. These include streamlining the route of the C-3 buses through Central Campus, adjusting the number of buses on the road at different times and the addition of the popular late-night buses Thursday nights.
Junior Matt Hoekstra, a senator on DSG's Athletics and Campus Services committee, asked about the feasibility of running all buses on biodiesel fuel. In response, Murphy cited a nine-month trial run with two buses that showed a 17- to 20-percent reduction in emissions. The buses ran on biodiesel fuel that was 20 percent soybean product and 80 percent regular diesel fuel.
However, he added that the cost of running all of Duke's buses on biodiesel fuel would be an additional $70,000 per year.
Students also voiced concerns about bus schedules, noting that buses often tend to stack up. Murphy explained that there are at least six East-West buses running during the day, with more in between class periods. It is inevitable that buses will back up given the number that are on the road at certain times, he said.
"We know there are challenges, but that is something you face on any college campus," he added.
Another issue that concerned students was a lack of parking and the difficulty of after-hours parking.
Reeve pointed out that because of events such as basketball and football games certain parking lots cannot always remain open after-hours. She also noted that much of Keohane Quadrangle used to be a parking lot, and that the number of parking spaces on campus has declined over the past few years.
"When I came here four years ago, the number one issue was that we had people parking everywhere," Reeve said. "We went through a process of improving our signage, our markings."
Students also asked about the feasibility of adding a C-1 bus on the weekends to reducing the inconvenience of East-West transit on Saturdays and Sundays.
"If we have enough people to justify running an East-West direct bus and still have people on the Central routes, we'll look at that," Murphy said, but she added that there were budget constraints.
Overall the administrators were sympathetic to students' concerns, though they made no concrete plans to make changes.
"I think the town hall was productive," Reeve said after the meeting adjourned. "We really haven't talked as a department or as an organization this year. This is an opportunity for us to hear how things are going. It's good for me to hear that sort of thing. It's obvious people want to make this work."
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