Lake Wauburg-bound students no longer have to cram into friends’ cars for a weekend excursion thanks to a new bus route from the Regional Transit System.
The newest RTS route to Lake Wauburg will begin on Jan. 18 and will shuttle students from the Reitz Union to the lake’s south entrance.
Buses will start running at 9:30 a.m and will run every hour to the lake, with the last shuttle leaving from Lake Wauburg at 5 p.m.
The route will only run on Saturdays.
The FloridaWorks office on Southwest 13th Street just past Williston Road will be the last stop before an express trip to Lake Wauburg.
Students will need their Gator 1 Cards to board the buses and to get into the Wauburg entrance.
RTS spokesman Chip Skinner said at one time there was a bus that ran to Wauburg, but the bus was discontinued because of low ridership.
“We had a lot of requests from the Student Body to bring that route back,” he said.
Skinner added that not all busses are equipped with TransLoc equipment, so the new route may not show up on the app.
Students like UF mathematics sophomore Anthony Delletiglie, 19, said the shuttle would make trips to Lake Wauburg more convenient.
“A lot of students who don’t have cars would enjoy going to Lake Wauburg,” he said. “It’s nice for them to have the opportunity to ride the bus there.”
RTS and UF had been discussing the possibility of a new route since early 2013, Skinner said.
Scott Fox, director of Transportation and Parking Services at UF, said the idea for the route was discussed with RTS at a committee meeting on transportation access fees.
“They came up with the recommendation to restore bus service to Lake Wauburg, and they were able to do that without raising transportation access fees,” Fox said.
Skinner estimated that the new route, running until June 28, will cost UF about $10,000.
Kate Heffernan, a 20-year-old UF political science and natural resource conservation junior, said if she lived on campus now, she would take advantage of the bus route.
“My freshman year, I didn’t have a car, and I knew Lake Wauburg was there,” said Heffernan. “But I couldn’t access it on my own.”
RTS also added Route 77 to its 2014 schedule. The route runs from Sante Fe College to Cabana Beach Apartments, near I-75.
A version of this story ran on page 1 on 1/8/2014 under the headline "RTS adds new shuttle route to Lake Wauburg"
