Students Protest Poor Bus Service; MacDougall Promises Further Talks

BY NADINE AWADALLA

Tensions were running high Sunday afternoon when around 50 students met with Executive Vice-President for Administration and Finance Brian MacDougall, and two representatives from bus management, to discuss what they said were declining standards in transportation services.

The meeting was initially convened to find solutions to a ‘crisis’ which involved eight students on the R10 Dokki bus route the previous week.

The students claimed a bus driver refused to take them to campus.

“We had a problem Thursday morning, there was a misunderstanding and miscommunication,” MacDougall said

Aya Shaaban and Malak Shamoun, both undeclared sophomores, who were waiting at the Cinema Tahrir stop, said that the 7:40 scheduled buses that arrived to pick them and five others up from the stop last Thursday were 20 minutes late.

The main bus was already almost full as it approached the stop – the third on its route to the New Cairo campus.

It was accompanied by a smaller bus, usually to accommodate any passengers that cannot find space on the main bus.

Shaaban and Shamoun said the bus driver prevented them from boarding the main bus citing lack of available seats.

However, a supervisor affiliated with the vendor that supplies the vehicles to AUC Transportation told the students that they could not take the backup bus until all the seats in the main bus were fully occupied.

He said there were 12 empty seats on the main bus.

According to Shamoun, the driver and the supervisor made contradictory claims about seating on the bus.

At that point, a student already on the main bus, disembarked and told Shamoun that there were only two remaining seats – both of which were “uncomfortable and broken.”

As the students argued with the supervisor, the main bus drove off.

Shamoun said that the supervisor informed them that the smaller backup bus would not leave until the next scheduled departure time of 10:05am – more than two hours later.

Shamoun also said that she called the supervisors at AUC, who were uncooperative and insisted that the students should have taken the larger bus.

Saying they had few other options, the students took taxis to the New Cairo campus, and complained that they weren’t reimbursed the taxi fare.

During the meeting on Sunday, MacDougall said he would ensure that the students were compensated for the fares.

However, MacDougall also told the Caravan that he would like to receive an “actual incident report” from the affected students because there appeared to be strong disagreement about the events of the incident.

For example, bus management representatives who participated in Sunday’s meeting insisted that there were nine vacant seats on the bus.

The bigger picture?

But students who had gathered in front of MacDougall’s office to lend support to Shaaban and Shamoun said that Thursday’s incident was a symptom of the overall issue of bus service performance.

“I think we can all agree that we’re not here today just for one incident,” Student Union (SU) President Nadine Hosny told MacDougall.

Other students said some of the issues that required attention included problems with route consolidation, the Service-Level Agreement, and the perceived decline in the service provider standard in comparison to previous semesters.

MacDougall, however, said that he and Hosny had previously agreed that “the meeting [today] will be specific to the R10 problem Thursday morning.”

“What unfolded was an escalation of frustration because people expected solutions to the broader bus service issues this [Sunday] afternoon, which frankly, the administration was not prepared to address,” he later told the Caravan.

“Today’s conversation, unfortunately, was a major distraction in terms of talking to the eight students [at the Cinema Tahrir bus stop] about what could have been done.”

For her part, Honsy said: “The only thing we need to admit at this point is that we have a structural problem.”

She added that the SU is concerned about student security and incidents like the one on Thursday put everyone in jeopardy.

MacDougall ended the conversation by promising a discussion of the other outstanding issues surrounding the bus service at the Transportation Committee meeting at 11am on September 30 at the Bacon-Crary meeting room.