Escort services is introducing a free shuttle that travels to and from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Green Line's Riverside station in Newton, Mass., in addition to extended hours for the Boston and Cambridge shuttle. The University also changed shuttle service providers this year from Crystal Transport to Joseph's Transportation.

The Riverside shuttle will be running from Sept. 11 to Dec. 5 and Jan. 29 to May 1, and will run on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 2 to 5 p.m., according to the Department of Public Safety's website. The bus will run every 20 minutes.

The Boston and Cambridge shuttle will now depart from campus at 12:30 p.m. and 2 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and at 9 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. on Sundays, in addition to its original departure times. Additional hours for the Boston and Cambridge shuttle will be funded by the Student Union on a trial basis, according to an Aug. 28 email from Rupert Thomas Jr. '14, head coordinator of operations at escort services, to the Brandeis community.

This schedule will be effective from Sept. 13 to Dec. 8 and Jan. 31 to May 4.

The email also stated that the University's shuttle service provider this year is Joseph's Transportation.

According to Director of Public Safety Ed Callahan in an email to the Justice, the switch from Crystal Shuttle was made after the "bus contract went out for bid since it was a substantial contract." Callahan said that he believes Joseph's Transportation will additionally allow for cost savings for the UniversityInitiatives to provide shuttle services to the Riverside station in the past had proved unsuccessful.

Student Union efforts to gauge student interest and provide shuttle service to Riverside in the past, including in 2006 and 2011, proved unfruitful despite positive indicators of student demand for the services.

During the 2011 trial run, a Riverside station shuttle ran over one weekend in November, according to a Dec. 5 Justice article.

According to Callahan in an interview with the Justice for that article, the shuttle buses served a total of 145 students, which is about 12 percent of the total caacity of the buses and about 2.5 percent of the entire student body.

The push for extended Boston and Cambridge shuttle hours and a Riverside shuttle began again during the spring 2013 semester, during which a survey created by the Student Union regarding shuttle services was sent in an email to the Brandeis community on April 5 in order to receive suggestions for improvement, according to an April 16 Justice article.

"Throughout this entire process, we listened to students and made these changes based on what was most popular," wrote Student Union President Ricky Rosen '14 in an email to the Justice. "In our Student Union Shuttle Hours surveys last year, students expressed a desire to explore extended shuttle hours to Cambridge/Boston earlier in the day on weekends, as well as a need to access the Riverside T stop, and so this is the avenue that we pursued."

Rosen does not believe that the fact that the Riverside shuttle will only run for three hours on the days that it runs will be an issue. "[T]he Riverside stop is only 10 minutes away, and so we intend to make many trips within that three hour time range to accommodate as many students as we can," he wrote.  

"Students interested in traveling into Boston or Cambridge on Thursday afternoons by way of the Riverside T-Stop could then take a shuttle back to campus that evening," Callahan continued.