The Missouri Students Association worked with the Columbia City Council on the city’s bus system revamp to improve transit for MU students.
COMO Connect, the rebranding of Columbia Transit, has already implemented several new transit routes and has announced its ideas to make the new bus transit systems more accommodating to students.
“(Columbia Transit) has always been here, but they have had a lot of issues getting people to ride their buses and use them,” Campus and Community Relations Committee chairman Chad Phillips said. “
They have rebuilt their whole system this year with new routes, more buses and drivers, and more routes going through the heart of campus,” he said. “So, we’re trying to help them and help the students utilize them as much as possible.”
The new routes pass through Greek Town and in front of the MU Student Center, as well as several other places around campus and the city of Columbia.
City Councilwoman Ginny Chadwick said the efficiency and availability of the buses is the biggest change from last year to this year.
“The biggest difference is the routes and the timing,” she said. “Buses are now running on cycles of 30 minutes, whereas before they were 45 minutes. So, they’re running a little bit quicker, which is important for students.”
In addition to the new routes and more efficient pick-up and drop-off times, MSA and Columbia Transit are finalizing an agreement to make passes cheaper for students.
Phillips said student passes will eventually be somewhere between $65-75 per semester, which is significantly cheaper than what non-students pay to ride.
“(Columbia Transit) originally sells (bus passes) for $100 to the public, but for developers, they sell them for significantly less if you buy 20 or more,” Phillips said. “They offered that to us, so we’re going to buy as many as we can, and try to sell as many as we can (to students).”
In addition to having a discount rate, Phillips said he has been working with the city to get the passes available for sale at the MSA/GPC Box Office in the MU Student Center.
This is still pending, but city multi-modal manager Drew Brooks said he hopes to see bus passes for sale in the MU Student Center by the end of this week.
“We already have seen a pretty sharp uptake in sales for our semester passes, and that’s due to our online presence,” Brooks said. “We hope that we will see a large increase in rides from students, especially once tickets are for sale on campus.”
Phillips said one of the main stimuli for CCRC’s involvement with this issue is that students demanded more transportation to get off campus last year.
“We heard from a student last year that was confused on how to get to the mall, and why there wasn’t public transportation options to get to the mall,” Phillips said. “We couldn’t really help them. These new transportation routes can get you to the mall, so we’ve been trying to help solve the issue of students being trapped on campus.”
Phillips said, for now, CCRC’s main goal is make COMO Connect more visible to students.
“Immediately, we just need to increase awareness,” Phillips said. “We’ll use ads, fliers and little things like that. We just want to get the word out there to students. A lot of these students would probably utilize (the system) if they knew it was there, but a lot of students don’t even know the routes or where they go.”
Brooks said the new routes were organized with students’ ease of use in mind.
“Our new routes run both ways and intersect at Rollins Street and Hitt Street near the MU Student Center,” Brooks said. “What we hope we’ve done is create routes that are a lot more convenient for students to use.”
