Students might have noticed the expansion of the Transportation Route Information Program and modified routes from Campus Area Bus Service at the beginning of the 2010-2011 academic year.
Introduced in 2009, the information program provides students with upcoming bus arrival times through the use of a mobile phone or electronic display boards located at 16 bus stops across campus.
Sarah Blouch, director of Transportation and Parking Services, said boards are only stationed at key bus stops because of their $8,000 price tag.
“We have to be kind of careful about it. We have a couple in the budget for the year, but they are cheaper in a shelter, obviously,” Blouch said. “Ideally, eventually, we would like to have the TRIP signs at all locations, but we are trying to be slow.”
The electronic signs were implemented to provide students with accurate arrival times through the use of GPS tracking in each of the CABS buses. Blouch said this allows buses to communicate and remain evenly spaced with their timing.
Although times are not displayed at every bus stop, students can access TRIP with a mobile phone by texting OSUTRIP followed by a space and the corresponding bus ID number to 41411.
“It’s huge, you know, and we rolled that out at the same time we rolled out the whole TRIP program,” Blouch said. “I was really surprised with the response.”
Blouch said recent statistics show that 45,484 unique users have used trip.osu.edu 265,684 times, and 10,443 unique users have used TRIP texting 538,889 times.
“I just usually text about 10 minutes before I leave for the bus stop,” said Holly Choi, a third-year in health information management and systems. “I’ve never had a problem with it, and I think it’s handy to have and it’s really easy to use.”
But some students question whether the program is necessary.
“I haven’t heard of anyone that uses the texting or personally know anyone that uses it, so why do we even need the boards? It seems to be more money wasted, and we don’t need that, too,” said Lisseth Flowers, a fourth-year in Spanish.
Blouch said improvements in access to the program might encourage more students to use it. She said CABS plans to work with university communications to develop more smart phone-friendly applications and create more options for students.
Not only is CABS updating its technology, it introduced a new route Sunday and will make two modifications to existing routes.
Blouch said the East Residential and Med Center Express routes will improve and a central connector route will be added to improve service.
“I don’t think these changes will be a negative for anyone,” Blouch said, “but will just be faster and provide new options.”
