News
Strain on Birnie Bus causes late night breakdown
By Haley Lynch ’17
April 7, 2016
Tags news
At 12:50 a.m. last Saturday night, the Birnie Bus broke down in the entrance of the Bundy Loop. The bus is responsible for bringing dozens of Hamilton students down the Hill and back every weekend, so a breakdown would leave many students stranded downtown. Jitney Coordinator Gabe Rivas ’16 notes, “The bus takes a lot of strain transporting students up and down the Hill and broke down as a result of that strain.”
Acting Director for Student Engagement and Leadership Noelle Niznik has noted in the past that, should the bus have a problem, it would take about an hour for the company to send a backup bus. In the meantime, the only option would be to employ 12-passenger vans reserved for use in case of such an emergency. Unfortunately, a capacity of 12 instead of the 44 seats offered by the bus necessitates a great many more trips up and down the Hill.
At 1:20 a.m., an all-campus e-mail went out notifying students of the situation and explaining that there would be no more requested stops or passengers taken down the Hill; all efforts were turned towards returning students to campus. Finally, between 1:30 a.m. and 2:30 a.m., approximately five to six runs up and down the Hill were made to bring everyone up from the bars. About 115 students were transported back to campus in the vans, and a substantial amount of students walked back up the Hill as well, according to Rivas.
“It was a pretty hectic situation,” he wrote in an e-mail, “In these situations the Jitney Coordinators do our best to alert the campus in a timely manner and respond as quickly as the resources allow us to.”
Niznik commends the response efforts and the initiative the students took to use the van in place of the bus, and says that we are currently working with Birnie Bus to establish a more efficient contingency plan, should something like this happen again in the future.