NOC shuttle buses
Megan Morris submitted on
Friday 17th August 2018
Complete
is there any way of bringing in free shutttle buses for NOC? It’s too far to walk for most people and not everyone can afford a bike / feels safe cycling on the roads & anybody who’s no longer in halls doesn’t have the liberty of a free bus pass & it costs like £300 for the year, people can’t justify spending £2.50-£3.50 every time they need to go down there (especially if it’s just for a lecture) so they miss out on important content & contact time. This shuttle bus could be seperate to the unilink ones as they stop at various points & serve the city centre as well whereas the shuttle could be direct from Highfield (to prevent a huge loss of income for unilink). This idea is also relevant to the general hospital for medical & nursing students.
Answers
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Emily Harrison submitted on
Thursday 30th August 2018
Complete
Dear Megan,
Firstly thank you for your You Make Change submission!
I'm really pleased you've brought this up, I absolutely agree with you that the cost of travelling to campuses such as NOC and SGH can be very pricey! This is issue is something which I indentified in my manifesto and as such am currently working on improving.
The first step, is that there will be an extensive sites survey going out just after Freshers' Week which I have designed with our insight team. This will ask lots of questions ranging from accessibility of campuses to participation in clubs and societies and availibility of Union services in order to better understand how our students use our sites and what they want from them and us. This data will be used to help inform our general sites strategy going forward for the year ahead to make sure we are working towards what students have identified as their needs. Part of this survey will include a section on transport to gauge what the current situation is in regards to travel across all of our sites to help us better identify the exact problems that need resolving. The hope is that this will provide with a large amount of significant data which will give us the backing to be able to make some decisions about how we most effectively resolve issues such as the one you have identified above.
It might be that the resolution does indeed need to be the creation of a shuttle service to other campuses, in a similar vein as the WSA shuttle bus. However this would be a very large undertaking and I would be hesitant to do this without first properly researching into the exact problems and needs of the students in regards to students travelling to other campuses. Hence, the survey above will help us to determine whether this is the right course of action or not.
I will be posting updates about this onto my Sabb Facebook account, which you can find here. However, if you have any other questions in the meantime please do not hesistate to drop me an email to vpsites@soton.ac.uk.
All the best,
Emily Harrison, VP Student Communities 2018-19