Correction appended
Nick Schillaci wanted to spend every night of his junior year at his girlfriend’s apartment, but he couldn’t. To get there, he would have to slog the 3 1/2 mud-soaked miles across the Autzen Footbridge and through a pitch-dark Alton Baker Park that separated his room in the Living Learning Center from her Duck’s Village apartment. Even visiting every other night left him dripping with rainwater when he reached her and kept him on edge throughout the trek.
“It was a routine event to sacrifice your life to walk there,” Schillaci said.
And the worst part, Schillaci said, was knowing it didn’t have to be that way. Because in 2008, the University of Oregon was the only school in the Pacific-10 Conference without a bus that ran past midnight. What he saw as the inadequacy of the bus service became first an obsession for the University senior, then a quest, and so he did what any college student who is passionate about something does: He created a Facebook group.
A little more than a year later, Schillaci is the designer of a late-night bus program that ferries more than 1,000 students between the Kinsrow area and the University every week, and the ASUO’s official liaison to the Lane Transit District, which provides Eugene and Springfield with bus service. And Schillaci said he’s still not satisfied: By next year, he wants to add three more routes that run until 2:10 a.m..
About 100 students use the late night route on weeknights, and ridership jumps to about 300 on Fridays and Saturdays. Students who ride the bus said it saved them from having to stumble home in the dark on weekends and from paying for a taxi on weekdays.
“I’ll tell you that this bus, this bus route, is honestly the greatest thing that has happened in the University of Oregon,” freshman Ryan Kautz said. The bus allows him to get from his Stadium Park apartment to parties near the University on weekends.
“What if they were driving?”
On weeknights, when Knight Library is open around the clock, Schillaci said most passengers are students returning from late-night study sessions. On those nights, the roar of the engine drowns out any conversation.
It’s a different atmosphere from Friday and Saturday nights when so many students cram onto the shuttles that the chatter drowns out the noises of the engine at peak hours. The high volume of riders often forces LTD to send an accordion bus to contain all of them. On Jan. 16, couples kissed, young men in heavy jackets snuck flasks out to swig, and students clad in soccer and basketball jerseys on their way to a party south of the river found the bus so packed they had to stand. The following Saturday, passengers belted “Happy Birthday” to a young woman who then lifted her shirt to expose her breasts. Schillaci said most of the riders on Fridays and Saturdays are drunk.
“What if they were driving?” he asked.
At Oregon State University, where the Beaver Bus has been running until 2:45 a.m. on weekends since 2006, bus coordinator Austen Samet said the late night service has cut statistics on car crashes, drunk driving arrests and sexual assaults. Schillaci predicted a late-night bus in Eugene would do the same. He is even drawing up plans for three additional late-night routes.
However, even the current service may not last until next year. ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz created a detailed proposal to finance the service permanently for the Oregon University System that involved the creation of a new fee to subsidize the bus and other transportation projects. The OUS has not yet heard the proposal.
Though Dotters-Katz has said he is doing everything he can to get the proposal approved, ASUO committees have been forced to plan as if they will retain control of the LTD contract and budget accordingly. To make room for other contracts, Athletics and Contracts Finance Committee members have spoken of cutting all or part of the late night service.
If that happens, Schillaci, who plans to graduate in the spring, said he will add a Planning and Public Policy Management major to his degree to stay at the University and fight for a four-route late night system modeled after the Pullman Transit bus system that serves Washington State University, even if it takes two more years and means thousands of dollars in student loans.
“A nerdish obsession”
Schillaci spends as much as an hour a day researching mass transit on the Internet and has committed route maps of many of his favorite bus systems to memory.
“Everyone’s got something they’re passionate about, but I guess I do have a bit of a nerdish obsession with buses,” Schillaci said.
Schillaci ogles his favorite manufactures of bus like a seasoned mechanic does a classic car. He is seldom without a dog-eared, torn blue school folder brimming with printouts comparing bus services across the United States using neon-colored perspective drawings of three-dimensional pie charts. When he is without his backpack and needs to use his hands, he clutches the folder between his knees.
Schillaci said buses have always obsessed him, at least for as long as he can remember. Though he sometimes strikes up a conversation with the driver after he boards a bus, he usually heads straight for a seat near the back of a bus and observes. People-watching, Schillaci said, is one of the reasons he rides buses in the first place. He said during the years he has ridden the bus he has watched passengers fight, buses break down and cars collide with moving buses.
“It’s a big living room. It’s like a big family,” Schillaci said.
From bus fiend to policy adviser
Once he began studying at the University, Schillaci’s first stop was, naturally, the bus. He caught the Breeze route to the Valley River Center to use the mall’s Internet with a friend, staying until closing time. When Schillaci realized the buses had stopped running, he was shocked at being forced to slog home in the night. The experience left him with inch-thick blisters on his feet.
Schillaci said he likes riding LTD buses, but that LTD’s service to the University was, in 2008, “definitely (in) the bottom 2 percent in the nation,” chiefly because there were no buses late at night. Every other school in the Pac-10 is served by buses past midnight, ranging from the “Night Cat” at the University of Arizona, which stops running at 12:45 a.m., to the Los Angeles County bus that serves the University of California, Los Angeles, around the clock. Schillaci decided the University should have similar service, which is why he created a group calling for it on Facebook.
The group proved successful beyond his expectations. He said more than 100 University undergraduates joined and several graduate students expressed an interest, only for Schillaci to find that he had not opened the group to them.
“It was something people really cared about,” Schillaci said. Among the University students who found the group, which Schillaci has since closed, was ASUO Vice President Johnny Delashaw. Delashaw was at the time building the platform on which he and Dotters-Katz would be elected and searching for causes students were passionate about. When Delashaw saw the size of the group, he and Dotters-Katz contacted Schillaci and met him for coffee in the EMU Fishbowl, where he impressed them enough to make transportation not just a key part of their campaign, but the issue Dotters-Katz has said will define his administration.
“His ideas were right on,” Dotters-Katz said.
When Dotters-Katz and Delashaw entered office, they gave Schillaci the title of transportation policy adviser. When asked if he expected to be paid, Schillaci said he turned the offer down, and that seeing the buses run late into the night would be payoff enough.
Schillaci was thrust into a position in which he negotiated regularly with representatives from LTD, a position LTD spokesman Andy Vobora said was beneficial for both sides. LTD usually deals with ASUO committees that
have several budgets aside from the bus contract under their oversight, which Vobora said limits his engagement to filling out paperwork.
“Mostly, we’re struggling to even find someone who can read a timetable or get a transfer, so it’s very refreshing to deal with someone so passionate,” Vobora said.
Instead, Vobora dealt with Schillaci. The result: the ASUO and University administration pooled about $40,000 to extend the hours for LTD’s 79x bus route until 2 a.m. every night of the week except Sundays.
Now that the bus runs until the wee hours, Schillaci catches a ride on nights when he has “nothing better to do,” when his friends are not playing beer pong or going to a bar. Then, he rides the bus to “nowhere” and “people-watches,” scribbling notes and figures about ridership in his folder. He said his only regret is that the service came after his girlfriend moved closer to campus.
“I kind of wish that she still lived in Duck’s so that I could have an excuse to ride the 79x,” Schillaci said. “Now I can’t say I’m going anywhere.”
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Night-owl transport
Daily Emerald
February 10, 2009
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