City to provide gameday transportation

Students and Ole Miss football game attendees will continue to have bus transportation to and from home games during the 2010 football season.

The O.U.T. buses will be running their regular routes on game day with the exception of the Blue West Route which will be going south on Rebel Drive starting at 4:00 p.m. on Fridays before games, due to the road blocks surrounding the Union. On Saturday the Blue West Route will go via Jackson Avenue only.

Game days are a large part of the revenue for the city of Oxford according to Ron Biggs, the general manager of O.U.T. 

“Football games always bring people into town and traffic is always bad,” Biggs said. The Oxford transportation officials realize that game days are difficult to navigate, and are trying with great effort to alleviate the traffic difficulties, Biggs said. 

Rebel Ride will also be in route on game days. The Rebel Ride transportation system has a contract with the city to run bus routes on game days. The routes will run to and from two different parking lots in the Oxford area.

There will be free parking available around town in public parking lots. The Rebel Ride will cover the Oxford Park Commission Activity Center parking lot as well as the parking lot at Oxford Middle School. Rebel Ride will shuttle patrons from the parking lots to the stadium and back.

“We have been doing this [shuttling] for the city for the last two years,” Audie Branch, Rebel Ride worker said. “And we are fine tuning it.”

The bus fare for the game day routes for Rebel ride is two dollars one way, and a round trip ticket would be four dollars.

O.U.T.’s standard riding fares will stay constant: student, faculty and staff will still ride for free with their Ole Miss IDs. As part of an agreement with O.U.T., the university pays for the students, faculty and staff to ride the bus, Biggs said.

Potential routes that run to the Grove have been discussed but additional routes would be completely dependent on the funding, Branch said. Extra routes for the O.U.T. bus and Rebel Ride are completely dependent on funding provided to them and at this time the funding does not permit any extra routes of transportation.

“I feel that the O.U.T. bus or Rebel Ride having routes near the Grove would be a wonderful idea, so that they could pick up the elderly and inebriated individuals,” Jeff Snow, senior, said.

O.U.T. is in the process of approving GPS screens on the buses that will display routes and maps to its passengers.

The screens have been approved by the Mississippi Department of Transportation, and are awaiting approval by the Board of Aldermen. These screens will help game day visitors who are unfamiliar with the area find their destinations with greater ease.