The Transportation Department, in response to requests from students, will begin offering a new Wolfline bus service to take students from campus to the downtown entertainment district near Glenwood Avenue Feb. 19. The service, called WolfProwl, will run Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights each week, Brian O’Sullivan, assistant director of planning and operations for Transportation, said. “This is in response to requests for an entertainment district bus,” O’Sullivan said of the addition of the new program. “There was a desire for students to get safely from campus to downtown and back.”The Wolfprowl bus service, which student fees are paying for, will take students from areas on campus and Hillsborough Street to two stops, one on Glenwood Avenue and one near the Wharehouse District, O’Sullivan said. O’Sullivan said the service will begin Thursday nights at 9 p.m. and run until 3 a.m. with no set schedule for pickup and drop off.”There will be nonstop service on Hillsborough Street from campus to a couple stops in the vicinity of Glenwood South and the Wharehouse District,” O’Sullivan said.Students will be required to show bus drivers student IDs in order to board the Wolfprowl bus. “This is not open to the public,” O’Sullivan said. “But we understand students will have guests. Each student will be allowed to have up to two guests depending on how crowded the buses are.”Students will also be subject to University Honor Code policy while using the WolfProwl service. “If a bus operator needs to call Campus Police or Raleigh police, they can,” O’Sullivan said. “We want everyone to get to downtown and back safe and sound.”Other new services Transportation is unveiling, scheduled to begin in the fall of 2009, will change the way students buy parking permits and will also allow students to purchase carpool parking permits. The parking permit purchase system, according to O’Sullivan, will make students ability to purchase permits based on several requirements, most notably credit hours. The new system will also be completely online. “This coming year the permit system will be more of an allocation system,” he said. “We will allocate a certain number of permits in each zone with certain requirements. We will actually be putting credit hour requirements on certain zones.”O’Sullivan said a student group doing a class project began looking at this type of permit purchasing system two to three years ago.”This is something we’ve been putting pieces into place for about three years now,” he said. “We had kind of been talking about it here and then a student group looked at it. Now all the pieces have fallen into place.”The other potential feature to be added in the fall of this year is a carpool permit system to allow students to save money on permits by traveling to campus with other students. Greg Cain, the assistant director for parking services, said the new carpool permits will allow two or three students to turn in single permits and be given one carpool permit, allowing them to save money and make parking less of a hassle. “Two or more students who have a parking permit could turn them in for full or a pro-rated refund,” Cain said. “With a carpool permit, those students will be allowed to park in any deck on campus.”Kelli Rogers, a junior in political science and Student Senate President pro tempore, said she has been working with Transportation for more than a year to develop the carpool permit system. “Sophomore year I started carpooling with a friend. I lived on campus and I realized parking is a hassle for students,” she said. “I wanted to lok into benefits for carpooling. Transportation was pretty open to it. We just had to fit the program to work here.”Rogers said another important aspect of the carpooling push is to help the environment. “There was not a lot of parking on campus and we wanted to try and be more environmentally friendly,” she said. “Students should take advantage of it. Parking is going to keep getting worse.”Cain said the fall program will have a cap on the number of carpool permits that can be given out to help test the systems effectiveness. “We would limit this to 100 participants,” he said. “The following academic year we could look to expand it if it proves to be successful.”