We are two students deeply concerned about the Wolfline changes for Fall 2026 semester.
As the University plans to repurpose 1700 parking spaces to 2000 parking spaces and parts of the Coliseum Deck, the Wolfline, a long-standing community resource, is having its off-campus access significantly reduced. Specifically, the removal of Routes 50 and 52 creates critical service gaps towards Main Campus and essentials like Food Lion, Walgreens and the DMV.
This plan assumes GoRaleigh will replace them, but are not 100% reliable. Route 12 maintains a 30 to 45-minute frequency at peak hours, whereas Route 52 can fill up every 13 minutes at peak. There are no confirmed expansions that will alleviate this bottleneck or address current overcrowding on the city route with similar stops, 11/11L.
Meanwhile off-campus, Centennial-bound riders will retain direct service via Route 42, while sharing capacity with Food Lion Park-and-Riders. Centennial will additionally receive a massive extension of Route 60 that currently services the College of Veterinary Medicine and its Park-and-Riders to D.H. Hill.
Prioritizing Centennial service breeds a sense of favoritism for select majors, but all students deserve equitable access to the transportation they’re required to fund. These changes undermine our land-grant mission as they additionally strip access from local community members who have justifiably relied on these routes for years.
Beyond logistics, these changes will exacerbate the pedestrian safety crisis. We urge reconsideration of these changes in light of the tragic death of Natalia Duque-Wilckens who was legally crossing off-campus roads.
By removing the bidirectional Route 50, students are effectively encouraged to play Frogger, running across multi-lane speeding corridors like Avent Ferry. These 30 mph to 45 mph zones host few crosswalks with low visibility. Eliminating off-campus service incentivizes student desperation to catch one-way routes to make it to class on time.
Communication surrounding these changes has been sparse. We’ve searched our inboxes for any prior notices we might have missed, and the best match we have is buried in an email for “The HOWL” sent Mar. 23 at 9:55 p.m. — the Monday after spring break — advertising a scheduled transportation town hall that was scheduled less than 24 hours later.
Two days later, a PassioGo notification arrived with a nonhyperlinked address directing us to the fall changes on the Transportation webpage, tucked away in the “News” tab, rather than the “Information/Service Schedules” page us students actually use.
And of course, we were reminded to “Stay informed and plan ahead!”
This is hardly sufficient amidst a housing crunch and a lottery parking system. Many students have already finalized leases and commutes; they cannot plan ahead for changes they weren’t informed were coming. Unlike the Morrill Drive reroutes, which were preceded by emails and physical signage at bus stops, students received no meaningful notice that reductions were even on the table.
We separately emailed Wolfline with our concerns, and were each informed via responses that these decisions were based on their own ridership data and that they would evaluate in August whether additional buses are needed.
If no passes are required to ride, how is this data being collected? If August is when they can truly evaluate need, why are students having this dropped on them now?
While we recognize constraints to funding and staffing, announcing major service cuts less than five months before rollout, without publishing data or providing channels for our input and seemingly without consideration for our safety and accessibility, raises valid concerns.
We encourage everyone to review these changes and form their own opinions. Share your thoughts with Student Government, the Transportation Office, your rental property managers, community advocacy groups and consider signing our petition.
While these updates may have been discrete, we intend for our opposition to be loudly heard.
