Ideas, complaints and potential solutions were debated Monday night as students and university administrators gathered for a discussion forum on the future of the Ibis Ride shuttle to Coconut Grove.
Monday’s event, moderated by Student Government President Lionel Moise, encouraged students to express their opinions to the administration about the shuttle service.
The event opened with brief anecdotes from senior Nate Clough and junior Melinda Jeubi, two student monitors on the Ibis Ride service that were responsible for checking student IDs and reporting on student conduct on the shuttles.
“If you’re talking about Fridays or Saturdays, there’s not usually any trouble, it’s not a big deal,” Clough said. “Thursdays are always the trouble days.”
“Really the worst experiences I’ve had on the bus are people puking every once in a while,” he said. “Probably the worst one was when they started yelling racial slurs at the bus driver.”
“Students just don’t know how to act,” Melinda said. “During Spring Break especially, we had students using double Cane Cards and they would give it to their friend. I would tell them, ‘no you cannot ride the shuttle,’ and they would get upset at me like it was my fault.”
Students were then allowed to pose questions to the monitor. The first question asked whether the monitors believed that many of the Ibis Ride’s problems could be remedied with the presence of police officers.
“Sometimes students don’t respect police officers either,” Melinda said.
Ibis Ride Committee Ad-Hoc Report
The Ibis Ride Committee met three times between April 15 and 28. It met with student organizations and residential colleges and held the forum.
They have come up with some options for renewing the program including implementing a payment system. The students in the forum agreed with this idea as long as it was kept affordable.
Another option was hiring off-duty police officers to ride the buses. Students and administrators felt that if these measures were needed to save the Ibis Ride than it was not worth saving.
Also, an increase in the Student Activity Fee was suggested by this committee to fund more busses and decrease overcrowding, a possible cause of the problematic behavior. However, this money from the referendum could not be used until the following year.
Last, changing the locations of the Ibis Ride pick-up and drop-off points would stop the overcrowding of lines, especially since Coco Walk has a lot of people even without students. More talks will be necessary between the Dean of Students Office and Parking and Transportaion.