The first of 10 new transit buses hit the road Monday morning, giving riders of Route 6 the Cadillac bus treatment.
Transportation Services ordered 10 new buses last spring in an effort to begin phasing out five older buses and increase the number of buses on the busiest routes.
Travis Walters, biomedical sciences senior and student services chair in Student Senate, said the new buses are slightly larger and lower to the ground to allow easier access for riders. Walters said the new buses would look to go on Routes 5, 6 and 36 because they are the busiest routes.
In September 2014, Kenneth Kimball, assistant director of fiscal affairs and compliance for Transportation Services, said the buses are an effort to help ease the transportation needs of an increasing student population.
“[The spring of 2014], 10 new transit buses were ordered and should be delivered in April ’15,” Kimball said. “This will allow us to take five failing, smaller buses out of service and replace them with larger, higher-capacity transit buses.”
In October, Peter Lange, executive director of Transportation Services, said Transportation Services is aware of the long lines for riding the buses and has been working to alleviate them and hopes to work better to do so through future funding requests.
“We need buses and drivers and fuel to make this happen,” Lange said.