York introduces shuttle system to the Village

Jacqueline Perlin
Assistant news editor
York will be unveiling two new shuttles on September 6, which will transport students from Keele campus to the Village.
The shuttles will be available to students beginning the first week of the school year, explains Wallace Pidgeon of York media relations.
“York’s investing $200,000 for the extension of the campus shuttle,” he says. “We are working as fast as possible to have new safety measures implemented by the time most students are back on campus.”
The arrival of the new shuttles comes after a recent death and a string of several assaults in York’s Village.
The running times of the shuttles would be based on the rate of student usage. The two new east and west routes will be running every 30 minutes alongside the express shuttle, which will run every 20 minutes, totaling seven departures from the campus every hour from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m.
Pidgeon says the university has increased its overall pledge to safety this year by $1 million.
“Last year the university only spent $8.9 million on safety,” he says. “This year we’re up to $10 million […] and this new money is coming from the university’s general revenue.”
The $1 million in funding from the university will be used towards safety and security recommendations, specifically from the METRAC report, a university-commissioned report that outlined areas where York could improve in terms of safety and security.
Vanessa Hunt, president of the York Federation of Students (YFS), admits that while the university is doing more for safety, there is always plenty of room for improvement.
“We’ve seen in the past [where] a woman was pulled from her doorstep […] we need people to walk students to their door and know they made it home safe [instead of dropping them off mid-street],” says Hunt, who raises concerns about unfulfilled METRAC recommendations. “The YFS has been meeting with the university to push for changes in safety, but they haven’t given us any timeline of when we expect things to start happening.”