Lack of demand for late-night busing
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Lieutenant Jim Prusha sits in a swivel chair on the second level of Kent’s police department. He adjusts his posture so he appears more slouched and casual, contradicting the serious tone of the story he’s about to share.
“One of the DUI crashes I handled was straight on into a tree and the engine of the car was pushed into the passenger and this driver killed his buddy. Had we stopped him before then, we would have saved a life,” Prusha says.
During the past year, the Kent City Police has arrested 216 people for operating a vehicle while intoxicated. Yet, there is an alternative transportation option that most students are unaware they already pay for.
Madison Merz, sophomore fashion merchandising major, utilizes the taxi services in Kent, but she finds herself spending at least $10 most weekends.
“I use the taxi system mainly on weekends when I am with my group of friends, especially on days when the weather isn’t nice and when we also don’t feel like walking to our location,” Merz said.
Merz and every other full-time student at the university already pays about $100 a year for transportation, allowing the Portage Area Regional Transportation Authority to receive more than $2 million from student tuition annually.
Part of PARTA services is a bus called the “Downtowner,” which runs till 3 a.m. on Thursday and Friday nights, picking up passengers downtown on the corner of Water and Erie Street at 1:48 a.m. and dropping them off at locations around campus.
It’s similar to other city-university busing systems, like the University of Akron’s ‘Roo Express,’ which services riders from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday; taking students directly to their homes on return trips.
PARTA, however, does not extend its services to Saturday nights because the route was eliminated in 2010 due to a lack of ridership.
“We ran it and couldn’t get people to hop on,” says Joseph Yensel, manager of operations and information technology at PARTA.
However, during the past year, about one third of the total arrests for operating a vehicle while intoxicated were made on Saturday nights between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m.
Prusha believes this percent would be larger if the city’s police force wasn’t busy making 28 prohibition arrests during just the first three weeks of the semester.
“This time of year, there’s a lot of parties and people are calling in noise complaints and fights and underage drinking and our night shift can be so busy doing all that stuff that we don’t have much time to try to stop cars,” Prusha says.
Prusha says a first offense for driving drunk is a first degree misdemeanor, meaning charges can reach up to six months in jail, a $1,000 fine and license suspension.
Yensel says in order for PARTA to relaunch the late night route on Saturdays, there needs to be a demand for the transportation. The company is open to recommendations and it recently tweaked a route to Dix Stadium based on a suggestion made via twitter.
Recommendations can also be made by emailing custserv@partaonline.org.