Relying on Shuttles Sucks

Getting around SCAD without a car means I either have to walk everywhere or rely on SCAD's free shuttle service, open to students. Each shuttle line has it's own color, and runs in a loop. The bus never comes the opposite direction, it just sticks to its route until it comes back to whatever stop you are looking for.

I discovered on my first day of classes that the red route is the most popular route; it goes by all of the Freshman courses, making it difficult for the upperclassmen to get on the shuttle. Therefore, multiple red buses run during the day. I ride the blue route to get to my classes, which are all in the same building. It's also one of the shortest routes, which makes it a fairly quick ride.

SCAD offers a mobile ap, called TransLoc (this ap actually services numerous universities; when you download the ap, you select your school and it shows the shuttles and routes available to you). TransLoc shows you where you are, where the buses are and what direction they are heading, and what time the next shuttle is expected to arrive at your stop. This would be such a useful tool, if only it was reliable. Unfortunately, it frequently will change expected arrival times, turning wait time at a stop into interminable lengths.

This is especially bad on weekends when riding the shopping shuttle, which takes students from Turner (a dorm) to O-House (my dorm) to Target to Best Buy to the Oglethorpe Mall back to Target (and then back to Turner for a loop). The entire route takes about one hour to go one direction. If you catch the shuttle at the first Target stop, you can expect to be on the bus for another hour until you get back to the dorms. So one 10 minute shopping trip requires you to wait for nearly an hour until a shuttle comes back around, and you can expect your entire trip to take you 3 hours. Not exactly efficient.

That's all for this week's blog post; I have homework and I'm watching Hell's Kitchen. Guess that's the extent of my multitasking for the evening.