CAMPUS BUSES RUN EMPTY
University paid $2.3 million to run rarely used Blue Line
Apr. 8, 2016
By Jonathan Capriel
When Lori Ingram, a nursing student at the University of Memphis, boards the Blue Line bus service she's usually greeted by a friendly driver and an empty shuttle.
The 20-year-old student from South Korea rides the bus service a three days a week to take her from classes at the U of M's Park Avenue to the main campus, which would be a 30-minute walk. While the service is convenient for her, she has noticed how little it is used.
"I feel like the only person on the bus almost all the time," Ingram said. "Sometimes I might see two or three other people on it."
A survey conducted by representatives for The Daily Helmsman came to a similar conclusion. More than 85 percent of the seats on the busses that traverse the campus area five days a week are empty, and some buses ride will make a full round trip completely empty.
Even though students and university employees can board the shuttles without paying a fare, the service is not free. The U of M paid nearly $725,000 in 2015 to Groome Transportation of Tennessee, the private company that operates the shuttles. That money comes from mandatory and non-mandatory parking fees that students and university employees pay. Since the University of Memphis signed the contract with Groome in 2012, the U of M has paid more than $2.3 million to the company.
While some people complain that buses seem mostly empty, they are essential to the university, said Thomas Miller, assistant director of Parking and Transportation Services at the University of Memphis. "Yes, I'd love to see the buses with eight to 15 people on them at a time instead of threes and fours, but for those threes and fours, that's their ride," he said.
Many of those who live in the graduate student housing at Park Avenue do not have cars or share one with a family member, Miller said. The Blue Line is their only way to get to the main campus. Many U of M employees without cars rely on the Blue Line.
Workers, like Quita McKiney, 28, who said the shuttle takes her walking distance to work.
"The bus are really helpful," she said. "The city bus takes too long and if I didn't have the Blue Line it would take me an hour to walk to work."
Larry Winters, a Blue Line shuttle driver, said he sees about 40 passengers a day during his 11 hour shift. Winters was a supervisor for the Memphis Area Transit Authority, where he worked for 30 years, before he took this job.
Winters doesn't see as many passengers like when he drove a city bus, Winters said, but he does get to know the passengers a lot better, many of whom are U of M Physical Plant employees who rely on the Blue Line to get to work.
"I drop a lot of them off at South campus around 3 (p.m.)" Winters said. "That's when most of them start work."
The Helmsman's surveyors recorded bus ridership for a three-week period before spring break, riding the shuttles for a little more than 12 hours. They rode the bus during all hours of the day and every day of the week looking specifically at the two main campus routes, the Park Avenue route and the special route to the Kroger at Poplar Plaza.
Using the data from the survey and determining the total number of hours the bus is in service, an analysis estimated that the bus service has about 687 riders every week.
Information provided to The Daily Helmsman via an open records request about the number of riders on the Blue Line offered only yearly totals.
The university reported that in the 2014-15 year, the bus served 62,465 rides. Even if the bus operates 50 weeks per year, that would mean 1,249 riders per week, well more than was determined by The Helmsman survey. The Helmsman survey was conducted for a three-week period during the spring semester. Enrollment is usually at its lowest during spring.
