Univ. of Iowa’s CAMBUS adds trips to Mayflower to meet student demand

IOWA CITY, Iowa (KCRG) - This year, University of Iowa is seeing a big increase in foot traffic from one UI residence hall - Mayflower. That’s why CAMBUS is adjusting their operations just slightly to meet the demand.

“Last year we were averaging in early fall about 1,200 boarding’s per day at Mayflower Hall, with those being really concentrated during the 8, 9, and 10 o’clock hours when people are traveling to campus to get to class. This year we’re seeing closer to 1,400 boardings per day,” said CAMBUS Operations Manager Mia Brunelli. “It’s the exact same number of stops, we’ve always had service to and from Mayflower Hall, what we’ve done is increased the number of trips to Mayflower Hall during certain periods of the day.”

She says they’ve seen their busiest boarding times increase by 30 percent more passengers compared to last year.

“We look at the number of students living at Mayflower and we can kind of approximate what the bus need is based on the number of people living there. We have some really good historical data that shows us for ‘X’ number of students living at Mayflower, here’s about how many rides a day we can expect to be needed out of Mayflower Hall,” said Brunelli.

And while this changes the number of trips to Mayflower, it won’t impact staffing for CAMBUS.

“As we kind of evaluate those needs for CAMBUS this year, we’re able to figure out where maybe a little less service is need versus where is more service needed and kind of trying to find that right balance.”

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