The shuttles on campus provide NSU students with easy transportation between various campus locations, rolling hills apartments and, on weekends, downtown Fort Lauderdale. While there are several new innovations that are working to achieve a highly efficient system, there is still room to improve.
NextBus is one of the major ways which students can access information about shuttle arrivals and locations. While the idea sounds helpful, it is only effective if it works. There is always a problem with my phone or the app itself. The times are always subject to change and not being able to access the information is a huge inconvenience.
There have been instances where, because of the refusal of the app to show the times, I have had to wait the entire 20-minute cycle for another shuttle to pick me up at Walmart. One time when the shuttle left me, I defiantly walked back to my dorm. By the time I arrived I was dying of heat exhaustion and internally wishing I had swallowed my pride and waited that 20 minutes; however, I was no less frustrated with the system that consistently inconveniences my schedule.
More drastically, the problem with the shuttles arriving well before their scheduled times also presents a problem to students without their own transportation. Don’t get me wrong, having a free ride to the beach on a Saturday afternoon is great, but paying for a 30-dollar Uber to get back to campus after missing the shuttle is less than ideal.
It is understood that the shuttle schedule cannot be timed to the minute due to the fluctuations in traffic and stop lights. At most, ten minutes allows for these changes. If I were to miss a shuttle because I got there three minutes before the scheduled departure time, then I would have little reason to blame the system. However, a few weekends ago I arrived at the stop approximately 20 minutes before the scheduled time. I not only waited until the scheduled time had passed but waited an extra 10 minutes to ensure that the shuttle wasn’t just running late but I received information the shuttle had, in fact, left the stop before we had even gotten there. This meant that the shuttle left more than 20 minutes before the schedule said it would.
This is not only a huge inconvenience given that the shuttles only come every hour or so but also frustrating. Even if the shuttle comes early, knowing that students rely on them for transportation back to campus should be enough for them to think twice about driving off more than 20 minutes early.
In situations like these, I am thankful for the invention of Uber, but nevertheless aggravated by the 30 dollars I must sacrifice for the ordeal.
