Students hoping to catch a ride down to Armory Square on the Student Association-sponsored Centro shuttle may once again be waiting in vain, but this time it will not be a mistake.

SA voted Monday to cancel the last two weekends of the shuttle’s service, citing poor ridership numbers and a lack of funds for promotion and advertising. SA President Andrew Thomson will send an e-mail to all Syracuse University students today, announcing the cancellation.

While SA did not originally set ridership targets for the shuttle, the numbers were disappointingly low and inconsistent, Thomson said. The shuttle carried 180 riders its first weekend of operation, dropped down to only 49 the weekend of April 4 and climbed back up to 127 this past weekend.

Another major problem plaguing the shuttle was a lack of publicity. The SA did not have the funds this semester to advertise the shuttle in order to boost its lagging ridership, Thomson said.

“Had the money been available and had we seen more consistency, we might have continued it,” Thomson said.

But not all of the inconsistencies in ridership can be attributed to poor publicity. For two weekends in a row, Centro failed to run the buses for part of the scheduled time. A dispatching error on March 14 and another on March 21 brought the buses to a halt for about three hours both days, said Rich Landerkin, director of planning with Centro. Centro was not paid for the lost time.

Nor was poor publicity the only thing that kept students away from the shuttle. LaDonna Davis, a senior sociology major, and her friend Jennifer Durkin, a senior economics major, complained that the shuttle’s hours of operation were not convenient for students who wanted to hit the bars in Armory. They suggested that the buses should run until 2 a.m., when most of the bars close.

“When we go to the bars, we don’t leave [to go downtown] until 11,” Durkin said. “Who leaves a bar at midnight?”

While there are no definite plans for the shuttle’s future, Thomson said he will spend the summer devising new strategies for promoting and advertising it. The $2,000 saved by canceling the service for the remainder of the semester will be used to fund the shuttle next semester, when the SA plans to set a goal of matching the ridership from the first weekend of this year. Thomson said the shuttle would not be in operation for the first weekend of the the Fall 2003 semester since SA must meet to pass a resolution restarting the service.

Informal plans to pass the shuttle service off to the university have also been put on hold for now, Thomson said. There had been some discussion of the university taking over funding for the service or adding an Armory stop to the Carousel Center shuttle, but no action will be taken until the fall, Thomson said.

Resident Adviser Nicole Buckley, a sophomore psychology major, would like to see the shuttle service continue for freshmen and other students on campus without cars.

“I liked it,” Buckley said. “My residents could get down there when they couldn’t before.”

Published on April 15, 2003 at 12:00 pm