Shay Frey and her roommate once had to take a bus to the Regional Transportation Center near Carousel Center and then transfer to another bus to make the trip to Wegmans.

Now the 4.9-mile trip from College Place to Wegmans will become easier because Student Association is funding a bus shuttling Syracuse University students to Target and Wegmans beginning Saturday.

If all goes well, SA plans to run the bus every Saturday until April 30, excluding March 12 and 19 because of Spring Break, said Taylor Carr, chair of SA’s Student Life Committee.

There are more than 960 people attending the event on Saturday, according to the Facebook page made for the event, but Carr said he doubts that many people will actually be there.

The first bus will leave College Place at 1 p.m. It will then travel to Goldstein Student Center to pick up students who live on South Campus and arrive at the Target in Fayetteville, the first stop, at 1:28 p.m., Carr said.

The bus will then travel to the Wegmans in Dewitt, arriving at 1:40 p.m. The bus will run loops to these four locations until the last bus leaves College Place at 5 p.m. The final loop will pick up students from Target at 6:28 p.m. and from Wegmans at 6:40 p.m. It will arrive at College Place at 7 p.m. and Goldstein, the last stop, at 7:07 p.m.

Carr said SA is excited the opportunity to provide this service has finally presented itself. SA’s communications team spread word about the event through SA’s weekly posts, SU News e-mails, Twitter and CitrusTV, he said.

Many students, mainly freshmen, have complained they couldn’t go to the grocery store because they didn’t have cars, said David Woody, an SA assemblymember and former chair of the Student Engagement Committee who first began the initiative.

SA hasn’t been able to start the program in the past because of funding, Woody said, although SA has talked about the program before. Woody could not give the exact cost of providing the service.

When the Student Engagement Committee first attempted to run the bus from campus to Wegmans and Target, the program funding was to be split among SA and the two companies, but one of the two companies chose not to help fund the program during the final step.

Last semester, SA created a student advancement fund, which is meant to prevent similar situations. The fund was designed to help SA fund necessary student services by setting aside a small portion of the student activity fee.

SA did not use the student advancement fund to begin the program this semester. For the trial run, it used money leftover from its operating funds and funding from the Office of Student Affairs. SA is looking into getting funding from elsewhere in the future, said Andrea Rosko, chair of the Board of Elections and Membership Committee.

If this Saturday’s trip goes well, Woody said SA hopes to receive the funding from Wegmans and Target to split the cost of the service with SA and make it a permanent Saturday bus route.

‘The plan from the beginning was to get both Target and Wegmans on board and run the show every Saturday,’ Woody said.

Frey, the freshman graphic design major who took the bus to the Regional Transportation Center to reach Wegmans, said she is very excited about the bus service. Frey found out about the Wegmans bus when someone invited her to the event on Facebook, she said.

‘It’s a pretty big thing because the people without cars don’t always know people with cars,’ Frey said. ‘It’s nice anyway now that we can just take a bus. I can only imagine the seniors’ feelings without cars.’

hawentz@syr.edu

— Asst. Copy Editor Laurence Leveille contributed reporting to this article.

Published on March 2, 2011 at 12:00 pm