By Nadra Mabrouk and Barbara Corbellini Duarte
Christopher Morisset, used to take the 5:15 p.m. Golden Panther Express shuttle from Biscayne Bay Campus for his 6:30 p.m. calculus class at Modesto Maidique Campus.
“Oh my God! Now it is at 5:35. I’ll be late,” said Morisset, sophomore biology major and lower division senator in the Student Government Council at BBC.
Morisset could choose to take the shuttle at 5 p.m., but that’s too early and inconvenient for him.
For the second time this semester, the schedule for the Golden Panther Express shuttle will change starting Monday, Oct. 8, drawing mixed reviews from students and staff.
Although the Department of Parking and Transportation was unavailable for comment, employees were distributing new bus schedules all day Oct. 1.
Oluwatamilore Odimayo, senior psychology major and senator at large at SGC-BBC, had trouble with the shuttle for two weeks in a row when he tried to catch it from BBC to MMC.
“Lately the shuttles have been messing up,” he said. “It comes late.”
Odimayo can now take the 5 p.m. shuttle from BBC to MMC and still have 30 minutes before his class at 6:30 p.m.
Megan Berges, a junior hospitality management major, is pleased with the new changes because she can get home earlier. She lives around MMC, but most of her classes are in BBC.
“I have class until 4:45 p.m. and the next bus is at 5:15 p.m,” Berges said. “There’s always a bunch of students on it and traffic is awful.”
Now she’ll wait only 15 minutes to take the 5 p.m. shuttle.
Davon Johnson, a senior journalism student, didn’t mind the changes, but he thought there should have been more advertising about it.
He remembered when the schedule for the spring semester of 2012 was changed on the first day of classes and nobody knew about it.
He thinks the same thing might happen on Oct. 8.
“It’s going to throw some people off if they have to get to class at a specific time,” Johnson said.
Gabriela Tarnay, teaching assistant for chemistry and society with Milagros Delgado, thought the new schedule is terrible because there is no shuttle at 7:30 a.m. from MMC to BBC anymore.
“If you have to be here at 9 a.m., it is impossible,” she said. “I need to be here at least 15 minutes earlier to get everything ready.”
She is concerned traffic in the morning will delay the shuttle, but she does not think the new schedule should be an excuse to be late for class or try to leave early.
“I can’t have that excuse. So it should be fair on both parts,” Tarnay said.
Dwayne Harper, shuttle driver for American Coach, thinks the reason they changed the schedule was to create more rides for students, but he is concerned that some drivers won’t have enough rest time.
In the old schedule, drivers usually had a 20-minutes break; now the breaks are around 15 minutes. He is especially worried about the bus that leaves from MMC at 12 p.m. The driver will have only a 10 minutes break to take lunch, if the shuttle is not delayed because of traffic.
“We can manage it, but it’s pushy on traffic,” he said.
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