(Photo courtesy of UMass Lowell Transportation Services) “UMass Lowell shuttle”
Carolina Tavares
Connector Contributor
UMass Lowell student Angelica Przytula leaves her final class of the day, ready to get back to her dorm and get some homework done, when she gets a text message. “Want to get dinner in 15?” says the text from her friend. Normally, she’d be delighted to go, but she responds, “Sorry, I can’t – the shuttles won’t make it in time.”
Several students have complaints about the shuttle system at UML, with many citing the system’s unreliability and lack of consistency. Administrators say that this lack of reliability comes in part from a lack of shuttle drivers. Since the pandemic, the number of shuttle drivers has been cut nearly in half from pre-pandemic numbers, according to Jon Victorine, the assistant vice chancellor for administrative and auxiliary services.
UMass Lowell runs three shuttle lines – the red line, the blue line, and the orange line. The red line connects the East and South campuses, the blue line connects the North and South campuses, and the orange line connects the North Campus and University Suites. Students often rely on one of, if not more, of these lines to transit to and from class.
Przytula is only one of the UMass Lowell students who find the shuttles unreliable. “It’s always a 30 minute, to an hour, to an hour and a half wait for a shuttle,” she said, describing how the wait times feel. “And even then, [the] shuttle stop gets really crowded, so the little shuttles come by, and they’ll get full in about five seconds, and it’s just really inconvenient.”
Music performance and music business major Arturo Romero described the shuttle system as “hellish,” saying that the buses were inconsistent with their arrival times: “It always felt like I was gambling on if I was actually going to arrive to class on time,” he said. “It felt like the buses were very, very, very weirdly coordinated and not optimized.”
The unreliability of the shuttles has a number of effects on a typical student’s day. “In order to get to class on time when I leave in the mornings or early afternoons, I have to ensure that I leave 40 minutes early from my dorm, and even then, it’s cutting it close a lot of the time,” Przytula said. “I just don’t think that’s practical.”
Some students say that changing the bus schedule, staggering shifts for drivers or alternating the size of the shuttles that arrive might make them more reliable.
The administration says it is working to fix these issues but are dealing with a shortage of drivers, a holdover from the pandemic, Victorine said. He said the number of drivers has been slashed from about 80 drivers pre-pandemic to nearly half that number, at about 45 drivers.
He said part of the university’s shuttle service is contracted from a company called Beacon NRT, who haven’t been the most dependable. “There’s no reason to hide this, but we do have some issues with NRT’s reliability in terms of fully staffing the afternoons. They’re great in the morning, but in the afternoon, we’ve been consistently down two buses,” he said.
The NRT-contracted buses also pose a logistical problem, as their drivers aren’t on radio communication with the smaller, UMass Lowell-owned shuttles. This often leads to a problem called bunching, where two shuttles won’t space out their departure and arrival times, and end up at the same place, at the same time. “If you have two buses coming together, that’s great in the scenario [where] there’s a lot of people waiting for a bus. But if two buses arrive at the same time, and they’re leaving at the same time, that means you’ve got to wait a whole, theoretically, up to 30 minutes,” Victorine said.
He said the transportation department places a lot of emphasis on student feedback, making sure that it gets received and implemented in a timely manner. “One of the very first things I implemented while I was learning was that I wanted student feedback. So, every fall since I’ve been under transportation, we’ve released student surveys,” Victorine said.
He said these student feedback surveys, sent out once yearly, are the basis for many changes made to UMass Lowell’s transportation. One such example of feedback-based change is the addition of more shuttles to accommodate student complaints about wait times. “I’m hoping that before or after spring break, we’ll be able to add another CDL – which is a 25 to 30 passenger [bus] – on both the blue and red line, between the hours of 2 and 7,” he said.
Victorine said he hopes this resolves some of the waiting issues. “That’s going to resolve [a few] things. One is the fact that NRT has been consistently missing that bus on both those lines in the middle of the afternoon. Two, by running until 7, that should help with the transition between day service and night and weekend service.”
Some students acknowledge that, despite shortcomings, they learn the significance of public transportation. “I think that college is a really, really, really great place to introduce people to [public transportation],” Romero said. “It’s how I got introduced to it, and I think that UML has a responsibility to make the system of transportation that they have for their students as efficient as possible.”
