Parking and Transportation Services has cancelled the Garden District bus route, leaving many students living in the area without a reliable way of getting to campus.
The summer semester ushered in several changes to the established Tiger Trails routes. The Tigerland A and B routes were removed at the beginning of the session and later reintroduced as the Nicholson-River Road A and B routes. Now, the Garden District and Downtown Vet routes have been discontinued entirely.
Brian Favela, the director of Parking and Transportation Services, said the routes being “underutilized” was the leading cause of the decision. According to him, the low ridership created too high of a cost disparity, with the passenger cost per trip on the Garden District route being 1.9 times the average of the rest of the routes.
“Knowing this information helped with our decision to reallocate these underutilized routes to the core of campus services aimed at improving our headway services at no additional costs,” Favela said.
Favela also said Parking and Transportation will be introducing a Night Service Express route from Campus to Tigerland and a Paratransit service for students, faculty and staff with mobility difficulties.
Many of the Garden District route’s regular riders were shocked by the cancellation, largely due to the way they found out. Spenser Biernacki, a 29-year-old biology Ph.D. student who lives in the Garden District, was heading to campus in mid-July and opened the TransLoc app to check the bus’s status, only to be greeted by a notification claiming the route would be shut down on August 11. Biernacki said she then got on the bus, where a small flyer with the same warning was posted on the vehicle’s interior.
“It was less than a month’s notice,” Biernacki said. “And they did it in the middle of the summer, so if people are coming back to school from being gone for the summer, they’re going to have no idea that they’re not going to have this resource to get to campus anymore.”
Biernacki was especially confused by the cancellation because of a conversation she had with Parking and Transportation months prior. Biernacki said she heard a rumor about the Garden District route being cancelled from a bus driver in October 2022 and immediately emailed Parking and Transportation to confirm if it was true.
The next day, the director of Parking and Transportation, Favela, responded with an adamant denial of the rumor. He also claimed that if that decision was ever made, Parking and Transportation would be the ones to notify people.
“PTS is committed to communicating any planned changes in a timely manner, and if any changes were to occur, those communications will come directly from my office,” Favela said.
Biernacki said Favela’s reassurance from months earlier made Parking and Transportation’s handling of the situation even more disheartening.
“It just seems like they don’t care,” Biernacki said.
After finding out about the route termination, Biernacki reached out to as many fellow grad students and Garden District residents as possible to make sure people knew about the change. For Samantha Rutledge, a 24-year-old graduate student working as the curator of birds for the LSU Natural Science Museum, this was how she learned the news.
“There was a small flyer on the bus. I didn’t really read it in full because I was just kind of like, it’s just background info,” said Rutledge. “But other than that, there wasn’t any announcement that I saw. It was just kind of put there on the bus by itself, and if you saw, it you saw it.”
Rutledge said the flyer and app notification were overall insufficient means to warn the Garden District community and speculated that there are many people who only found out about the closure when the bus stopped coming.
Rutledge feels far more warning should have been provided because the lack of bus transportation is a very significant problem for many people in the Garden District. She said owning a car is nearly impossible for her and many other grad students because of the low university salary they receive. Without the bus, Rutledge said she will have to take a 15-to-20-minute bike ride to campus every day.
“It’s a problem on days where there’s bad weather, or if you’re too sick to do that,” Rutledge said about the issue of relying on a bike.
For 30-year-old Carlos Reina-Flores, transportation options are even more limited. Reina-Flores survived a traumatic brain injury that left him with several mobility-based disabilities. He cannot legally drive a car. He also said biking or walking to campus is out of the question because his slow reaction time and problems with balance leave him prone to falling and getting injured.
Reina-Flores is studying pre-cardiopulmonary science with the intent to study respiratory therapy at the LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. He said his classes are demanding and require him to be on campus almost every day, which would be impossible without the bus.
“I need this bus to move from my house to here,” Reina-Flores said.
Reina-Flores said his need for transportation is so significant that he would not have come to LSU if he knew the Garden District bus was soon for the chopping block. For school, he moved from Honduras to his grandmother’s home in the Garden District. Because his grandmother is too old to drive him to campus, he said the bus route made the move possible.
“If I knew this before, one of two things would’ve happened,” Reina-Flores said. “I wouldn’t have come to LSU, or I would’ve looked for a different place and restructured my life.”
Reina-Flores said he emailed Parking and Transportation about the issue repeatedly for two weeks before getting a response. When he finally received a response, Reina-Flores said Parking and Transportation only recommended he look into the Baton Rouge CATS bus system and didn’t answer any questions regarding why the route was cancelled.
Reina-Flores said the CATS bus stop closest to his home is a 25-minute walk, which he can’t safely make.
“I’m devastated,” Reina-Flores said.