UMatter, TigerTransit to provide nighttime weekend bus service

UMatter, a university-wide health communication initiative on bystander intervention, is partnering with Tiger Transit, the university bus services, to provide a nightly bus service for students from Prospect Avenueto their dorms on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, UMatter student fellow Adam Cellon ’17 said.

Director of Transportation and Parking Services for the University Kim Jackson did not respond to a request for comment.

Cellon explained that the bus will run from 12:30 to 3 a.m. on these three nights, taking a special route by Prospect Avenue, Frist Campus Center and the residential college dorms. Students can use an app called TigerTracker to follow the routes of the buses.

"In theory, this sounds like an effective initiative," Lauren Richardson ’18 said."The main issue is going to be tracking the buses using the app. Not all students may be in the state of mind or have the patience to track and wait for the bus."

Cellon said that the bus will provide a safe space for students going home from the street and will include two sober host students. He added that these two sober students will include a Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources and Education Peer Adviser and a peer health adviser.

"The idea behind the bus is to give a better opportunity for people to intervene if there are problematic situations," peer health adviser Michael Chang ’16 said."The situation that we want to help avoid is one where someone is being walked home by somebody they are not comfortable being walked home by."

UMatter Project Manager and Director of the SHARE Office Jacqueline Deitch-Stackhouse said that this initiative idea was the result of a student project from EGR 392: Creativity, Innovation, and Design, a course offered in the spring of 2015. Deitch-Stackhouse said that one of the groups came up with the bus concept and piloted it in the spring.

Tim Lau ’17, one of the students who originally came up with the idea, said that the group's goal was to find a way to mitigate sexual aggression on campus. To develop the initiative, the group conducted and analyzed over a hundred interviews to investigate student opinions on sexual aggression on campus, and found that many students felt the anonymizing environment of the street and the journey home from the street unsafe.

"We wanted to figure out if there was a way to interject and see if we could mitigate sexual aggression during this process of going from the street and walking back to the room," Lau said.

Following the initiative, UMatter decided to use the idea and rebrand it as well as implement it officially with one or two changes, Deitch-Stackhouse said. She explained that because the bus initiative is a longer-time initiative, and not a pilot study, the University must abide by all bus policies, noting that, for example, the bus policies prohibit food and water on the bus.

According to Lau, the original project included providing food on the bus to incentivize students to use it.