Students may notice changes in the intercampus shuttle bus this year, after Pace dissolved its contract with Northwestern, effective today.

Pace discontinued its route 426, which served some of NU’s intercampus transit needs, including stops at Ryan Field, Technological Institute, and the Ward Building on NU’s Chicago Campus.

The decision was made because Chicago Transit Authority and Pace are trying to find a solution to their financial woes.

“(We) hate cutting services,” said Michael Bolton, Pace’s deputy executive director of strategic services. “We’re trying to maintain services and in order to do this, we decided to retract our contract with Northwestern.”

Operated by Regional Transportation Authority, Pace has been facing a buckling financial bind for months. Pace’s suburban bus program is in a $23 million deficit and its Americans with Disabilities Act paratransit program faces a $27 million shortfall.

“We’re in the same position as CTA; we have structural deficits,” Bolton said. “When you don’t have a lot of money, you look for routes, which do not meet our performance measures, for duplicate routes and (for) those which are not recovering their costs.”

Bolton said route 426 was eliminated because it was too expensive for Pace to operate and there was a geographic overlap with the CTA’s Purple and Red lines.

As a result of this service cut, NU renewed its contract with Shuttle America, formerly Royal American, in order to meet the university’s transportation demands.

Although Pace’s contract cost less for the university because of the fact that NU could share the cost of the service with the public, Pace’s decision to cut route 426 did not pose a problem for the university, said Brian Peters, director of university services.

“We just replaced Pace with a private service provider,” Peters said.

NU used both Pace and Shuttle America in past years to maintain the intercampus bus program. Each operated half of the buses.

Intercampus buses under Shuttle America will operate differently than buses under Pace, Peters said.

The shuttles run from various stops in Evanston to the Ward Building in downtown Chicago. They will operate at earlier times, making only scheduled stops, and will allow standees on board. This will allow the buses to maintain a more reliable schedule, Peters said.

In addition, students can expect a new fleet of buses early next year.

“The buses will be coach, so the suspension will be much nicer,” Peters said.

The buses will also have overhead compartments and may also be equipped with TV screens, which would run closed captioning.

Currently, Shuttle America is running a fleet of eight buses, with about three or four buses on the road at any given time. The trip downtown takes about 45 minutes.

Although NU’s intercampus shuttle has not been adversely affected by Pace’s financial problems, students may find themselves paying more for transportation into and out of Chicago if the CTA and RTA do not receive additional funding.

Over the summer, Pace proposed fare hikes and services cuts which were scheduled to take place a week ago.

Action on the hikes and cuts was postponed because of an ordinance passed by the RTA Board that opened funds set to be released in 2008.

Action on other route eliminations, which was to take place in October, was also postponed until Nov. 4.

A Web site created to encourage donors to help the “capital funding crisis” facing Chicago area transit states there is a $10.3 billion need for capital improvements required over the next five years in order to keep the system from deteriorating.

Of that, only $3.1 billion is funded by presently identified sources.

“This is only a stop-gap measure,” Bolton said. “We need to find a long-term funding solution.”

Reach Paul Takahashi at [email protected].