There’s a lot to love about the Regional Transit System here in Gainesville: There are 40 daytime bus routes, nine of which cover only UF’s campus, and five Later Gator night routes. All of them are free (or at least covered by fees) with a Gator 1 Card. In many ways, it’s a convenient system for getting to campus, Midtown or any other place in Gainesville you might want to go. As long as you go there during the daytime on a weekday.
Just looking at RTS’ TransLoc Rider app on my phone, the difference between weekday and weekend service is staggering. As mentioned before, RTS has 40 daytime routes, and on most days, almost all of those routes will be running and taking people from point A to point B. Now, looking at my phone on a Saturday afternoon, just 17 are running. For those of you who are mathematically inclined, that means only a little more than a third of RTS’ daytime bus routes run on weekends. Check back a day later, and RTS is down to 15 bus routes. The situation is even worse when you count Later Gator routes. RTS has five Later Gator routes, organized A through F. While Later Gator routes are an asset in many ways, they can be limited at times. While the routes are inclusive and go to most of the places students want to go, two of the routes only run on Saturdays, and none run on Sunday. Students who party (and sometimes drink, unfortunately) Friday nights face limited options to get back home, and students who go out on Sundays face even fewer options. While some may play it safe in the face of this conundrum and take an Uber or use a designated driver, others may not do so and instead drive themselves, leading to more drunk drivers on the road and a higher accident risk for everyone.
For such a comprehensive system, these gaps in service are glaring. While some reduction in service is understandable, and some services would likely be too underused to be worthwhile (such as Later Gator services Monday through Wednesday), RTS has been too extreme in its service reductions. During the day and at night, the weekends can be busy times both for students and other Gainesville residents, but the service schedule of RTS would make you think this university of more than 50,000 students and a city of 130,000 grind to a halt on weekends. In fact, Gainesville can be quite active on weekends, with parties and events all over the area. The bus service should reflect that.
So how can RTS improve its service and minimize such gaps? There are things that would be good first steps. The most obvious would be to make all five Later Gator routes run on Friday evenings. Fridays are as much a night to party and go out on the town as Saturdays are, so the fact that Later Gator isn’t running its full service on Friday night is baffling. RTS can also operate at least one or two Later Gator routes on Sundays, so students who unwisely chose to party late into the night can easily and safely get home and recover for classes the next day. And as for a daytime service on weekends, a full fleet of buses running on Saturdays and Sundays would be unreasonable, but it would be reasonable to continue running a few of the most popular weekday-only routes through the weekend. For the Gainesville area, adding days to a handful of RTS routes would make a huge difference.
Jason Zappulla is a UF history junior. His column appears on Mondays.
