By EDDIE MIKUS
STAFF WRITER
Walking over to the Ram Van office in order to reserve a seat for a Ram Van ride will soon be a thing of the past. Instead, Ram Van sign-ups will now be available online, thanks to a new system currently in the works.
“I think it will be great,” Marc Canton, director of University Transportation, said, describing how the new system will run. “It’s going to work via your My.Fordham portal, and the reason for that is because essentially, by you having to log into my.fordham, your credentials as a member of the university are sort of automatically checked, built into the way the portal works.”
Charles-Henri Sanson, the director of Internet Services, offered further insight, via email, into how the new system will work. Sanson is designing the specific programming that will enable the online signup program to be operational.
“Once you log in, you will instantly see if there is availability on any particular Ram Van trip,” Sanson said. “Then you select the date, time and direction that you want to go and then hit reserve. It is that simple. You can also sign up for a return trip, if you wish. The site works equally well from your smart phone or any computer.”
Sanson also said in the email that the system is expected to be available within the next few weeks.
When the system does become operational, it will be the only way for students to sign up for the Ram Van.
“This will be how you sign up for the Ram Van,” Canton said. “The current system of walking up to Lowenstein counter or into our office and flipping through a binder and writing your name on a carbon copy — that is going away the minute we implement this.”
According to Canton, however, students will still be able to sign up for the Ram Van at either the Rose Hill or Lincoln Center campus.
“Where we currently have our books, we’re going to have kiosks,” Canton said. “Wherever there is currently one of those binders, it will be replaced by a keyboard and monitor.”
Canton believes that this new setup will be more convenient for students.
“The problem now is you currently have to walk all the way over here, which is fine if you are in O’Hare,” Canton said in describing the process of signing up for the Ram Van. “Those folks don’t mind so much but the folks in Salice-Conley don’t love it too much. Or maybe you’re off campus or maybe you’re working all day and you only come to campus just in time to get your van. So now you’ll be able to do it online, from anywhere. Anywhere you have access to the Internet you can do it, and if you have a smartphone, which seems to be common these days, you can do it from your phone, even. To me, that is just inherently more convenient.”
Additionally, Canton highlighted the fact that the new online sign-up program will allow students to better be made aware of any emergency changes that may occur with regards to Ram Van service.
“One of the things that I also think will be a benefit from a convenience perspective is, at the top of the page, there will be sort of a message board, where we’ll be able to leave a message for anyone who is coming to sign up,” Canton said. “For example, this past weekend, snow days. Say you click to sign up on a Friday, there would be a message saying, ‘Hey, we’re not running, the snow has forced us to cancel’ and would be right in front of your face, there would be no surprises.”
Although the Ram Van office publishes information about closures on its website and Twitter account, Canton said that the message board would be a more universal way of reaching students.
“Currently, we put [emergency information] on our website, we put [emergency information] on our Twitter feed, but what I like about this is it’s sort of in your face,” Canton said of the message board. “If you’re going to sign up for that van, it’s hard to miss the fact that we’re closed, so if you’re not the kind of person to check our website or follow us on Twitter, this is sort of like a fail-safe, because if you miss it there, there’s not too much we can do about it.”
However, establishing the online sign-up does come with some challenges. For example, Canton said that the new system needed to be able to enforce Ram Van policies.
“I think on the outside looking in, even for me, it looks simpler, but as I’ve been working with them in trying to build this, the intricacy of the details necessary for our systems and our policies makes it extremely difficult to try to accommodate that,” Canton said.
He cited a specific Ram Van policy that prohibits students from reserving places on multiple vans departing from the same campus within two hours of each other.
“Let’s say you sign up for a 12 noon van,” Canton said. “You’re not allowed to sign up for the 12:30. Why? Because, over the years, someone would come in, they’ll sign up for the 12 noon, the 12:30, the 1:00, the 1:30 and the 2:00, so that whatever time they end up being able to go, they have a spot reserved. In the meantime, though, other folks who want to come in and want to use the van, they can’t sign up. Sometimes they’ll come and wait and that’s fine. When that person doesn’t show up, they’ll come on. Other times, when they realize, ‘Hey, maybe this van is full,’ or something to that effect, they’ll go and take the train or do something else and meanwhile, there actually was a seat available on that van. So, in the online system, we had to have a way of preventing that abuse.”
Part of the decision to switch to an online system came from student feedback of the Ram Van.
“Every summer, as part of the normal course of the year, we do a lot of brainstorming and a lot of reflection,” Canton said. “We take all the surveys you guys give us, and the ideas in the surveys, and frankly, online signups are something that has appeared with regularity and consistency over the last few years. And we’d read it, and say, ‘Hey, they’re right. We need this, how can we do this.’”
Canton also said, however, that previously existing software programs in the transportation industry were too expensive and not suited for use by the Ram Van office.
“Up until now, we’ve looked at, basically, the transportation industry, and in the transportation industry, there are several different versions of software packages,” Canton said. “Those software packages are extraordinarily, extraordinarily expensive, and really cost-prohibitive, and they’re not really designed to do what we do. So not only would they be expensive, they wouldn’t have worked perfectly. And so, now, for the first time, we have something that was custom-built. This is custom-built just for Ram Van.”
As such, the new system needs to be able to accommodate future changes to Ram Van operations.
“We’re hoping to make the registration system totally paperless,” Canton said. “The drivers, instead of having a paper sheet, would have some sort of tablet, and also such that you could buy tickets online. So we’re envisioning a system where you have an ID, and you swipe that ID, and your information pops up and a ticket is deducted from your account. Therefore, this Phase I portion of the system needs to have in its mind the outphases. It’s solely sort of the adding on instead of the replacing of the entire original system.”
