More than three years ago, the city worked with the University to make off-campus routes a reality.

Now the city is asking that the campus do what it can to return the favor.

“The city has requested that the campus shuttle serve the downtown in some way,” Mayor John Quinn said. “This is a little bit different, because this time we’re going to them.”

City officials, who requested that other possible off-campus routes be drawn, feel they have been accommodating to current off-campus shuttle activity.

“We’ve been supportive of the shuttle in the past two off-campus routes by providing help with the establishment of the bus stops,” Quinn said. “We put up signage and got benches and did a couple of things like that.”

The city hopes that the University will show similar support for their proposal.

“All along we’ve felt that it would really be beneficial if the shuttle could stop downtown,” Quinn said. “We have quite a few students, we’ve identified several hundred in fact, that live downtown. Also, we know that many hundreds work downtown. There are occasions where the students really need the downtown.”

The shuttle service, which operates mainly off of parking fees and fines, logged 248,000 riders last semester. While this figure combines on-and off-campus riders, the off-campus routes continue to see an increase in usage.

“I think it’s working very well,” Fred Smith, director of shuttle services, said. “We’re looking at a 60 percent increase in the off- campus north route.”

According to Smith, while the increase in the off-campus south route hasn’t been nearly as large, it remains strong, and carried over 100,000 riders last year.

Expansion of the north route is one way the city may get what it wants.

“It would seem to me that a realignment of a northern route would be a more feasible way of getting this,” Quinn said. “The northern route already serves commercial businesses like the mall (Woodland Towne Centre) and Kroger’s, so it’s not out of their procedures that they might make commercial stops.”

The prospect of more commercial stops is something that local merchants favor.

“It would be a nice benefit,” Gail Baden, manager at Panera Bread, said. “It would bring us more business because in the winter, students don’t want to walk in the cold, and also it would be easier for our employees to get here.”

According to Bic Pirooc, manager at Easy Street Café, shuttle routes involving more of the downtown area would also be a step forward in safety.

“It seems to me that this should be something the University should want to do for the students,” he said. “This would be a promotional advertising angle for the University to offer to prospective students. It would be good to let them know that there is a shuttle service for the students when they come downtown so they don’t have to deal with the bar crowd.”

For Quinn, the creation of such a route could also be the answer to both a city and campus concern–parking.

“We both have very serious parking problems,” Quinn said. “We feel that anybody who rides the bus is helping both parking problems.”

While support for the project has merchants and city officials on cloud nine, funding remains up in the air.

“We’ve looked a couple of different times at the possibility of subsidizing the purchase of a bus,” Quinn said. “But we’ve never looked at the cost of paying the driver or maintaining the bus.”

However, funding issues will be the determining factor in the possibility of moving this project beyond the discussion stage.

“The issue has always been trying to find financing,” Chief James Wiegand, director of public safety, said. “There are a lot of little things to discuss and some major obstacles that are sitting out there.”

Though options of applying for grants and asking local merchants to chip in are possibilities for raising funding, nothing has been set in stone.

“There’s never been any sit- down, formal discussions to explore all the possibilities,” Wiegand said. “It’s really a question of trying to determine where some financing might come from and how we might best serve the University community and those individuals on whatever route we establish.”

If plans do move forward in the future, riders will not have to worry about losing any current services.

“I will not curtail any of the existing services for the shuttle that we currently have,” Smith said.

Mayor Quinn agrees that whatever the outcome of the proposal, the primary focus of the shuttle service should remain on University students.

“It’s not our intention to try to find ways for Bowling Green citizens to get from here to there,” he said. “But it is our intention to try to make the downtown more accessible to students.”