Undergraduate Student Government Downtown voted Friday to renew a transit system for students known as the Sun Devil Express and expand routes to the local grocery store.
The Sun Devil Express, which was started in 2014, carries students from the Taylor Place dorms and Roosevelt Point apartment complex to several of the parking garages around the downtown area, getting students to their cars faster than a walk with a Arizona State University Police Department escort.
These wait times could be as long as 30 minutes to an hour before a police officer could walk a student to their car, USGD president Jackson Dangremond said.
Student government officials broke down the use of the service into two categories: the evening safety shuttles and the Sunday grocery runs when debating renewal of the service. There were more than 2,000 rides on the grocery route, Dangremond said, adding that the number of individual riders was not available for that time. The Monday through Thursday route had about 1,000 rides, he said.
Vice President of Policy Jimmy Arwood, who didn’t support the bill, said the difference in usage pointed to student money being wasted.
“When we’re taking $60 every year from the student fee, I find that we have a moral responsibility to make sure every dollar is spent adequately,” he said. “I felt that there are possibly other ways we could solve this because we weren’t getting the ridership that I believe we should be getting to maintain that service.”
Dangremond said the cost of the service is expected to rise to over $40,000 from $36,000 last year to facilitate the new Wednesday route and a larger advertising budget for the program designed to draw in more users.
“Give or take, it was costing us about $36 per ride,” said Arwood. “The Sunday trip was costing us $2 to $3 per ride.”
Despite Arwood and others’ reluctance to continue the plan from the previous year without significant changes, the bill to renew the service for another year passed without opposition from USGD senators.
“Although there may be other alternatives, there aren’t any right now and taking it away would not be beneficial to students because our main concern is for their safety” Sen. Case Smith said according to the meeting minutes.
The Sun Devil Express is expected to resume weekday route service on Sept. 5 with grocery store trips starting on Sept. 10.
Contact the reporter at ckmccror@asu.edu.
