The front page story of The Paisano on Sept. 14 focused on the current transportation mess UTSA is in the midst of, and for the most part the article seemed to constantly mention how the students rejected a proposal to increase the transportation fee by $10.

I believe the fee was rejected because students are fed up with the shuttle system in general. Why do we need the number of shuttles we have now? A banner above Chisholm hall reads “Class in 10 Minutes? No worries,” insinuating that you can quickly get to class if you live on campus. To be honest, though, you can walk from Tobin Lot and Lot 12 to the UC in about 10-15 minutes. It’s not a hard walk; in fact, it’s rather enjoyable, and by walking you’re shunning the need for a shuttle all together.

Why don’t we as a student body walk rather than take a shuttle?

Our campus is not overly large; we’ll do just fine. I personally got sick of just missing shuttles and waiting 15+ minutes for another shuttle pass, and when I did get on the shuttle I was sick of being crammed into a maxed out capacity shuttle, listening to random people talking on their cell phones the entire trip. This all happened after the initial “Hop On Board” initiative was passed, when supposedly UTSA had sufficient money to run a decent shuttle service.

In short, I think we need to respond loud and clear to the request at the end of the article made by Wilcox, the director of Business Auxiliary Services: “Students need to tell us what they want.”

What we want is to keep UTSA an affordable school. We don’t want people who don’t use the shuttle to have to pay for shuttle services. Sure, it’s only $10, but it’s $10 more than we were already paying a few semesters ago for a service that is wholly unnecessary if we as students were to take initiative.

Stop using the shuttle, start walking and let’s make our campus better for it; if we do that, the shuttle problem will take care of itself.