The Colorado College Alternative Transportation Service, more commonly known as CCAT, has added an additional Sunday shuttle as part of an initiative to push students toward riding the shuttle for non-emergency transportation.
Safe Ride is a transportation staple at Colorado College, which experiences high volumes of calls on the busiest weekend nights. Safe Ride employees and Campus Safety supervisors, however, would like to see students utilize other alternative modes of transportation in order to maintain safety as the top Safe Ride priority.
The CCAT is the umbrella acronym that encompasses both the shuttle service and Safe Ride.
The CCAT runs on a fixed route and is intended to assist students traveling between major dorms on campus, streets commonly visited such as Uintah, Weber, Cache, Yampa, and Acacia Park, Wednesday through Saturday, 9 p.m. to 2 a.m.
An alternate route, spanning from Loomis Hall to further locations such as Old Colorado City, Walmart on Eighth Street, and CHSP Urgent Care, runs on Saturday and, most recently introduced, on Sundays from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Shuttles are a seamless and common service offered by colleges and universities in the United States, designed to assist students who do not have vehicle access with off-campus opportunities for shopping and leisure. The service would be far more effective, however, if students were aware the service even existed.
“The practice of what everybody understands [transportation on campus] to be is to call Safe Ride,” said Officer Nick Calkins, Associate Director of Campus Safety. “And [students think] that the CCAT shuttle is Safe Ride, and that everything that’s provided is Safe Ride. So I think maybe we just [need to] advertise it better and explain what those things are.”
Safe Ride is intended to serve up to a maximum of three people in what Officer Calkins refers to as “life safety issues.” Students walking alone or students who feel generally unsafe in a small group are urged to call Safe Ride directly and request a pickup within five blocks of the campus.
Anything more life threatening or unsafe should be referred to Campus Safety or local authorities via 9-1-1 immediately.
Student driver, junior Brooke Boyle, explains the logic behind Safe Ride’s limited seating. “At night if you’re walking across campus in a group of ten people, you’re much safer than one or two people walking completely alone,” she said.
The push toward the Shuttle is spurred by the commonplace abuse of the Safe Ride calling system. “A lot of the time when you answer the phone you will have a group of eight, and when you tell them you can’t take eight people they say ‘Oh we only have two,’ and you show up and it’s eight,” said Boyle. “And it’s really—it’s not easy for the driver to have to constantly deny people like that, and you waste a lot of time doing that when you could have actually been taking people places.”
Groups of three to 15 can easily be accommodated by the CCAT shuttle, which can be tracked in real time as it runs via www.ccatshuttle.com. A live GPS feed will show the exact location of the Shuttle in relation to the user, and will allow for better planning and, as Campus Safety and Safe Ride hopes, more efficient weekend transportation services.
The common rebuttal to such a change, as noted by Officer Calkins, is that issues of efficiency would eradicate themselves if more Safe Ride vehicles were driving on high activity nights. The college, however, tried to run more vehicles, resulting in very little improved efficiency.
“The argument has some validity to it, but it’s not as efficient in the long run,” said Calkins. “It costs a lot more money in maintenance and gas to run the Safe Ride than it does to run the shuttle.” He attributes the start-and-stop nature of Safe Ride, versus the fixed route that the Shuttle operates on, for such cost discrepancies.
As students move to using the CCAT shuttle, Safe Ride intends to shift its hours to maximize efficiency as well.
Based on Riderlogs, the log system by which Safe Ride drivers make record of the frequency of calls and space between rides, Campus Safety will adjust the Safe Ride schedule accordingly and will inform students when major changes will take effect.
Brittany Camacho
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