Wow. A shuttle to take students over ~0.5 mile, that they can walk in ~10-15 minutes. Considering that taking the shuttle will most likely save only a few minutes of time, what exactly does this encourage other than less physical activity?

The bus says “UCLA Bruin Bus”, not “Big Blue Bus”. Please fact-check your articles.

I’m a staff member who sometimes treks over to the Hill for lunch…if the trolley shaves off even just a couple of minutes from the time I usually spend on my lunch hour walking across campus, it might be worthwhile.

What a waste of gasoline. This is just stupid. It only takes me like 5 minutes to walk.

This is a horrible idea. Why? I’ve made a list.

1. It encourages laziness and less physical activity. We are already suffering from increasing obesity rates. This makes it even easier to be lazy and not walk. Combined with the fact that the vast majority of dining hall food is unhealthy, we are just creating a campus full of unfit Bruins.
2. If people want to eat at Hedrick, they take that 5-minute walk up the hill. Many people willingly do so to avoid the crowds at DeNeve. Not only does it increase their physical fitness, but it makes eating at Hedrick a nicer experience when you know that it will be less crowded. I often make that trip to eat at Hedrick because I know it’ll be less crowded.
3. Feast at Rieber is opening soon, which means that a lot of people who eat regularly at DeNeve will be flocking to Rieber instead.
4. The bus service costs money. The funds that are allotted for its gas, driver, and upkeep could be put to better use in improving the menus at the dining halls. (How about adding more healthy options like fish, berries, and nuts, huh?)
5. Not only does the bus congest the traffic around the residence halls, but it adds to UCLA’s carbon emission footprint. What happened with the dining halls wanting to be “green”?
6. Waiting for the bus and sitting on the bus is actually more time-consuming than simply walking to Hedrick. So people who go to DeNeve because it’s on the way to class won’t see the point in wasting even more time waiting for the trolley.

From reading the other comments on this thread, I think that the folks at UCLA Dining should have gotten the point by now that this “DIning Shuttle” is a waste of money and commitment. I would like to say though that I think the fact that UCLA Transportation has an antique is pretty awesome (and something that I did not know about before) and I think that this and the many other vehicles of the department’s fleet could come in handy for students in a far better way: creating a shuttle service between the Dorms and the main part of Campus. Currently, residents of the Hill (I being one of them) have to trek a good .5 miles just to get from De Neve (which is the dorm at the very “bottom” of the Hill) to the Ackerman (at the westernmost edge of the cluster of “campus” academic buildings). If you have a class in one of the “hard” North Campus buildings like Public Affairs or live in a more in a more distant dorm like Hedrick, the trek can be much farther, requiring to walk down one hill and up another: last year, when I lived in Hitch Suites, my morning commute to Bunche Hall (a little over a mile, according a mile to Google maps) took a good 45 minutes. Such long journeys not only make for a waste of productive time but wear students out to the point where they find it difficult to stay awake in the very class that they exhausted themselves to attend. I do understand that there is a shuttle that runs to the hill between 11 and 2 (?) and another one that goes about after 6 in the evenings: though these services are definitely invaluable (especially the evening shuttle), they happen to miss the very two times of the day when most students are making their commute. When I have raised the question of an all-day hill-to-campus shuttle in the past, I have been rebuffed on the grounds that the roads to the hill are “not wide enough” to accomodate a bus of the size necessary for peak commute times: well, apparently, with this trolley on UCLA Transportation’s hands, that should no longer (seemingly) be the case.