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Michela Galego has gotten three parking tickets on Syracuse University’s campus after racing to make her classes on time. Galego, a communications design student in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, commutes from the Nancy Cantor Warehouse in downtown Syracuse and doesn’t have time in her schedule to park farther away.

But Galego said she’s one of the luckier ones. For students who don’t have a car, resorting to “unreliable” university-provided transportation isn’t always an option.

On Jan. 30, SU announced it would discontinue the trolley’s Warehouse Loop – which functioned from 8 p.m. until 3 a.m. – and replace it with a new Euclid Loop that wouldn’t make stops at the Warehouse. Three days later, SU announced it would incorporate a Warehouse stop into the Euclid Loop in response to student concerns.

Nayyabb Raqibuzzaman, an industrial design student, was at the Warehouse Jan. 30 at around 11 p.m. when he found out. Centros had already finished running for the night.

“It felt like it hit me like a truck,” Raqibuzzaman said.

Raqibuzzaman and other VPA students said SU’s alternative, safety shuttles that run on an individual-order basis, don’t fill the need or demand for transportation at night. Before SU discontinued the loop in the first place, though, students said they already couldn’t rely on SU’s transportation to and from the Warehouse.

“We were having problems with these systems in the first place, and then they reduced them to even worse conditions… So when the trolley came back, everyone was like, ‘great, but also, we’re still dealing with the same problems we’ve been having this whole time,’” Galego said. “It’s hard to figure out when you should advocate for that and when you should just be like, ‘well, this is my life.’”

The previous Warehouse Loop and the current Euclid Loop include a time period when only the safety shuttle runs, and a period where students don’t have access to SU transportation at all. After the Trolley stops running at 3 a.m., the Centro doesn’t start back up again until around 7 a.m., an hour after the safety shuttle stops running at 6 a.m. For students who stay at the Warehouse into the early hours of the morning to get work done, the gap conflicted with their academics.

Ciana Steller, a second-year communications design major who lives on South Campus, said the safety shuttle has denied her because the trolley is running when she’s at the Warehouse, even if it’s set to stop running by the time she’d arrive back on main campus. Galego pointed to safety concerns that come with unreliable travel from the Warehouse in the middle of the night.

“It makes students have to make the decision of ‘am I gonna put my education, or my safety first?’ which is something that we shouldn’t have to do,” Galego said.

Galego said students are expected to put in 10 hours of work outside of the classroom for each of their two four-hour, studio-length classes at the Warehouse. She said because of how passionate students are, the work usually adds up to more than just 20 hours, and sometimes takes all night.

“There are things you just can’t get done outside your warehousing machines, so you have no choice, no option,” Galego said. “When they do something like take off the bus, you’re kind of helpless. You just have to put up with it.”

Stephanie Zaso | Digital Design Director

Bennicia Callaham, a senior fashion design major who also lives on South Campus, said getting to the Warehouse means taking two different shuttles and leaving over an hour early. Ultimately, some students plan their lives around how they’re going to get to class, she said. She and Raqibuzzaman said both the trolleys and buses have consistently arrived at and left stops before or after their scheduled times.

“Every morning is a guaranteed run,” Raqibuzzaman said. “Every morning it happens. Some days the bus comes a little early, which is good, but now you’re dying to get there. And then other days it comes much later, like 10-20 minutes later. So you can just never tell. But you get used to that.”

Faced with unreliable transportation, students said they’ve turned to expensive rideshare options in order to get to and from the Warehouse, which can be excessive on top of the out-of-pocket supply costs design majors face.

“It’s choosing between education and safety, (but) also education and money, because students often will order Ubers to get back if the trolleys aren’t coming and the safety shuttles are unreliable,” Galego said.

Steller said that on Tuesday night, she left the Warehouse around 1 a.m. and didn’t arrive back on South until around 2:40 a.m. after taking two shuttles. She said she had to wait for the trolley and the bus after the first scheduled ones she planned to take didn’t show up.

The difficulty traveling back and forth puts design students in their own bubble, Steller said.

“It’s very isolating because if you have two classes at the Warehouse even with, say a five hour gap in between, or a four hour gap, it’s almost not worth it to go back to campus,” Steller said.

Arlo Stone | Design Editor

Steller and Galego both said part of what isolates students who take classes and work at the Warehouse is a disconnect from other SU students. Steller said because of the Warehouse’s separation from the rest of campus, other students don’t really know what the Warehouse is or what design students are doing there.

“I try to maintain my friendships … but it’s very difficult because there’s just a lack of relatability to what we’re doing here and how far we are and having to schedule around classes, but also just convenience,” Steller said. “There’s no (reason) to come down here to meet up for lunch or for coffee if they don’t have to be down here. It makes it harder to maintain relationships on campus, or to be involved on campus.”

Still, Galego said students feel immense support from their professors and classmates at the Warehouse.

“It’s also hard to complain about this because we are so privileged to have the support that we do have here. So I think that’s probably why students have been so quiet about issues like this because we all do feel lucky to have the space that we do. But it’s just when the resources start getting taken away …this has been a problem, now it’s worse,” Galego said. “We haven’t been talking about it, so I feel like we should start talking about it.”

Published on February 9, 2023 at 12:28 am

Contact Jana: jlseal@syr.edu | @JanaLoSeal