Many students located in the more far-flung residences of the Rensselaer campus often use the school’s shuttle system. Even students who are lucky to live in the close-to-campus dorms may use the Red Hawk shuttle as a great way to get to and from downtown Troy without having to walk the hundreds of grueling stairs that comprise the Approach. Running on two routes—West, which stops at the Rensselaer Union, Sage Ave. in front of E-Complex, Blitman, and Polytech Apartments; and East, which stops at the Union, ECAV, and West Lot—the RPI shuttle system provides convenient transportation to nearly everyone on campus.
Now this is all fine and dandy, but the real point of this article is that the Red Hawk shuttles have a new and improved schedule this year! Including scheduled times for each stop, this new schedule promises to remove the mystery wait time that used to accompany shuttle trips. The shuttles run every 7–9 minutes from 7 am–11 pm on weekdays, and every 20 minutes from 9:30 am–5 pm on weekends. To get your hands on a copy of this glorious, new-fangled schedule, ask any of the shuttle drivers, who should have plenty of copies, or visit the department of parking and transportation website at http://rpi.edu/dept/parking/shuttle.html/.
This new schedule is the latest in a line of changes implemented in the shuttle system in order to make it more efficient and reliable, and to better serve the students. Other changes include alterations to the shuttle routes based on student feedback, such as placing Blitman before Polytech on the West route to avoid congestion in the mornings. A “Shuttle Tracker” service has even arisen recently, in both website (http://www.shuttles.rpi.edu) and app form, to allow students to keep up-to-date on where the shuttles are at all times.
We at the Poly applaud and salute the department of parking and transportation for their continued efforts to improve and revise the Red Hawk shuttle system as an example of the student-administration communication which is so important to making RPI great. As one area where student input has consistently mattered and been taken into account, we sincerely appreciate the effort on behalf of the department, and urge other divisions of the administration to follow their lead.
One area to look to in the future is to work on the Department of Parking and Transportation website, as navigating it can be somewhat confusing. We eagerly await future developments in the shuttle system and student/administration communication.