Opinion piece

 To some I believe a bus schedule may just be a list with a random assortment of dates, times and locations. To those who suffer from ailments that prevent them from being able to drive, a bus schedule can be the only thing providing them any sense of independence at all. Many colleges do a great job advertising how efficient and useful their school’s transportation is, but when a student goes to that institution and is forced to deal with the failures and preventable inadequacies associated with that universities transportation, issues arise.  When I look through the Bus schedule presented by UB, there is no time where any student should wait for more than 20 minutes for a bus, even during the most scarce weekend hours. This information gives me the confidence to travel into the harsh winter climates using UBs transportation with the confidence I can rely on the accuracy of the schedule posted. As a senior at UB, I can vividly remember several times where a weekend excursion to the grocery store turned into a hopelessly frustrating activity. The UB busses have trackers on them, they are not always accurate but from my experience they are pretty solid, this helps a tremendous amount when figuring out when to catch the bus, but often I don’t have the same luxury going home. I genuinely don’t think it’s fair to make students wait 40+ minutes in cold climates while holding bags or groceries, all to wait for a bus that was promised to arrive once every 20 minutes, or more frequently. At first I thought this was just a few isolated incidents, but talking with students at UB it is clear many share my disdain of UBs weekend transportation services. This wouldn’t be as big of an issue in my eyes if UB didn’t advertise their transportation prowess and even market grocery shuttles as an incentive to go to the university. What is possibly more infuriating is how little busses are shown to even be running on the tracker app during certain weekend times, in those cases it is clear it is impossible for them to abide by the schedule even if they sped as fast as they could. What is preventing UB from sending more weekend busses? When you look at all the money that UB spends on events and toward salaries(President and football coach specifically) it seems reasonable that they could afford to send a few more busses and keep a few more drivers on payroll during weekends if they were motivated to address the issues. It strikes me as a lack of care toward the community of people who need transportation recourses, many people on the UB campus, such as myself, have no other means of transportation aside from paid car services or the UB busses. This puts a great deal of stress and pressure on those groups of people when the busses fail to run in an effective or efficient manner, in my opinion if the school can do anything additional to prevent this they should. I’m my opinion It is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE to have just one bus running around an entire campus of this size  at a time, and if you wish to ever have that be the case, have the decency to update the campus community as it is happening or mention its possibility within the initial UB bus schedule.