“Have mercy, been waiting for the bus all day;” this lyric was true for ZZ Top in the ‘80s, and is true for students today. Beginning next week, SFU Facilities Services will launch an online survey which will ask students for the details of their daily commutes.
Students answering the survey will have the opportunity to explain how they travel to campus and why they choose to do so in that manner.
Facilities Services, which is co-sponsoring the survey with SFU’s Sustainability’s Office and the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, anticipates that students will mention challenges such as bus pass-ups and the commute length, among many others.
This survey will provide a baseline for ways in which SFU can improve its transit situation as well as intercampus connections.
The idea originally grew out of the BC government’s initiative to reduce carbon emissions by 33 per cent below 2007 levels by 2020. Since the Burnaby campus is primarily a commuter campus, transportation to and from the main campus contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), explains SFU’s Sustainability Office’s website. As part of the desire to create a more sustainable culture, the office pegged transportation as a key area for improvement.
However, in order to make those improvements, there had to be some sort of empirical backing. “How can we prove anything if we don’t have good data?” Elizabeth Starr, campus planner, Facilities Services, explained.
Facilities Services had previously conducted traffic surveys about road capacity, parking situations, and traffic demand, but had never specifically addressed energy use. Starr said, “The type of data we have gathered before did not tell us about commuter GHG emissions.”
Furthermore, one of Facilities Services’ responsibilities is campus planning and development; therefore, they felt it was important to understand how students arrived at and travelled between SFU’s three campuses.
“We need to know what will serve our students best,” said Starr.
Students might even see the statistics from this survey in the classroom; according to Sustainability Consultant Justin Bauer, the Geography Department could eventually use the data in their Spatial Interface Research Lab. “So [students] are not only answering the survey, but then they get to do the analysis on something that is local and important,” explained Bauer.
The data from the survey will identify the age of participants using certain types of transit, as well as the location of those participants. Bauer imagines this will help SFU target distinct populations who face different transportation and mobility issues.
Although Starr was hesitant to claim that the survey would solve all of students’ transit issues, she did say it could provide avenues for improvement: “The data will help to identify transit and transportation issues and help to plan for the future, but its not about promising immediate change.”
The survey will be launched on Mar. 10, to close on Apr. 6. Students will be contacted to respond to the survey via their SFU Connect emails. After crunching the numbers, SFU Institutional Research and Planning and Facilities Services will jointly publish the results.
