Hi there,

Firstly thank you for your You Make Change submission!

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.

As a first step, I have worked with our SUSU Insights team to put together an extensive sites survey which ask lots of questions ranging from accessibility of campuses to availibility of Union services and participation in clubs and societies and options 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 (E.G. How do people currrently trave? How would they prefer to travel? ect.)  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. 

The problem with subsidising bus passes, as someone has pointed out in the comments of this submission, is that the pass could be used generally rather than just for getting to the NOCS campus and there is no way of logging how it is used so that would create a fairness problem for other students and could very easily spiral into all students demanding bus passes which we do not have the financial capability to support unfortunately. Most likely the outcome which could satisfy all in regards to free travel to NOCS is a shuttle bus, in a similar vein to the WSA shuttle bus. This is certainly something that I have considered and, if we have enough data fromt he survey to support, we could explore with the University.

In regards to the cycling issue of it being dark, we purchased some high vis back pack covers following a suggestion from our SUSU NOCS Site Officer and were recently down at NOCS giving these out to students for free to ensure that they are visable and safe on the roads as the nights get darker in the winter months. If you haven't got one of these and would like one, you can come and collect one from the Sabbatical Office in the SUSU building.

I will be posting updates about this onto my Sabb Facebook account, which you can find here (https://www.facebook.com/suvpcomms.southampton). However, if you have any other questions in the meantime please do not hesistate to drop me an email to vpcommunities@susu.org.

All the best,

Emily Harrison, VP Student Communities 2018-19