There’s an unspoken rule most Texas A&M students bank on when having to deal with overcrowding on buses during the first couple weeks of school — you just have to wait until people stop going to classes for buses to clear up. 

Every year that I’ve been at this university, this rule has been true. By the third or fourth week of lectures, the Aggie Spirit Bus does clear up, making it easier to find a place to sit or comfortably stand during your journey to class and beyond. 

However, the rule might not work this year. 

The university transportation system has opted for a centralized “bus hub,” bringing all buses back to the Memorial Student Center for transit. For all the new freshmen on campus, this used to not be the case — there was another hub for buses, with Trigon now essentially shut down for bus transportation. 

In theory, this is a fantastic idea. The thought of being able to transfer from the bus that takes you to campus to the bus you need to take to go to class without walking ten minutes in between sounds amazing, and technically you can do that now. 

Every bus is lined up along either Old Main Drive, Lamar Street or Houston Street. So, if you arrive on campus via Elephant Walk and need to head to the Bush School of Government, all you have to do now is walk around Simpson Drill Field and board Route 5: Bush School. You don’t need to walk from the Corps dorms and through the throngs of students bannering for their organization just to catch the bus anymore. 

So, it sounds great, right? No one should be complaining about this, right? 

People are complaining about this, and it’s completely justified. This new bus system, while it has done some good, has led to much more bad. And the problem lies in not understanding what A&M is. 

The bus hub isn’t a revolutionary idea that A&M invented; many universities do the same thing. The problem, however, is that this isn’t any regular university. This is A&M, one of the biggest universities in the country. We should be proud of that, but in this instance it hurts us. 

A&M has north of 75,000 people enrolled across its campuses. If we assume that around a third of that number takes the bus every day, that’s still a whole lot more people than some universities have altogether who rely on public transportation to get to class. With the old system, we were able to spread everyone out and dilute the already horrendous College Station traffic. But now, everything feels more clustered. 

When we don’t utilize how big our campus is and centralize everything, traffic builds up. There are too many people near the MSC now, but if you walk next to Heldenfelds — where a majority of the current buses on Lamar Street used to transit at — it’s completely empty. Why can’t we utilize this space, something other universities don’t have the pleasure of doing? 

And buses are still crowded, something this was supposed to fix. The university transportation system thought shifting locations would solve everything, but the same problems as before remain. This wasn’t a location issue; it’s an infrastructure problem. Moving everything to one place can’t solve everything — there’s so much more needing to be addressed. 

When Trigon was still around, routes like Elephant Walk or Fish Camp could avoid one of the busiest intersections in the city and make a right turn on George Bush Drive, heading down Coke Street for transiting off-campus students. 

Now, every bus is essentially forced to go through the same busy intersection, which probably increases wait time and lowers frequency. This leads to overcrowding on those buses, and then it forces more intra-campus buses to accommodate the bigger waves of students coming off these buses. It’s a chain reaction that couples the already existing problems with newer ones. 

The bus hub can be good. It will probably get better through feedback. However, it’s just not there right now. 

My suggestion is to reinstate Trigon. Why did we need to fix something that wasn’t broken? If you can’t walk ten minutes to the MSC from the Corps dorms, then get a Veo. The MSC is the middle of the university, but the campus doesn’t revolve around it. Many other sections were much reachable with Trigon, like the many engineering students who have classes at Zachry. An unintended consequence is that there is more adaptation needed than pure convenience. 

But let’s be real — if we were banking on people not showing up for classes for the bus system to get better, there’s a bigger problem to be addressed than just moving every bus to one place, and this new bus system definitely doesn’t address it. 

Joshua Abraham is a kinesiology senior and opinion columnist for The Battalion.