The Joey has been stuck in the same place for two months now — or so says its Web site.
The JoeyTracker, the online resource meant to show students the whereabouts of the Joey, Tufts' campus shuttle bus, has suffered from a series of recurring technical malfunctions since its installation nearly two years ago.
As the problems remain largely uninvestigated, a group of students outside the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate has created an independent Web site to help locate the Joey.
The university's JoeyTracker is designed to use a global positioning system (GPS), which has units installed in each of the two regularly circulating shuttles. But the buses' locations on the satellite grid and their estimated arrival times have not been reported on the tracker's Web site, joey.tufts.edu, since the start of this year.
Neither the TCU Senate, responsible for maintaining the Web site, nor Joseph's Limousine and Transportation, the company that administers the Joey and whose drivers man the GPS systems, can definitively identify the cause of recent glitches.
Installed in January 2008 through the efforts of the TCU Senate, the JoeyTracker is a free service. Its GPS is meant to transmit the location of buses to the Web site.
Tufts' Support Services Manager Sheila Chisholm, who works on improving shuttle service, said her department is open to holding a meeting with the TCU Senate "to talk about where everything is going" with regards to the JoeyTracker system.
Chisholm said Support Services is "in the very early stages" of looking into possibly attaining a new system for the shuttles. Whether that system would entail acquiring replacement buses or updated GPS units is a determination that remains months away and would ultimately be based on which system is most cost-effective.
But updating the JoeyTracker is not among the Senate's top priorities, said TCU Senator Joel Greenberg, co-chair of the Senate Services Committee.
Meanwhile, a group of students independent of the Senate and of the Joseph's Limousine company has established a new system to improve access to the Joey's whereabouts, simply by publicizing the bus's schedule.
The students' recently created catchthejoey.com allows students to access the times of the Joey's scheduled departures from Davis Square, the Olin Center, the campus center and Davis Square. Students can also text "findjoey" to a specific number to access the information by cell phone.
Four computer science students initiated work on catchthejoey.com last academic year, and the three remaining students leading the cause unveiled the system at the beginning of this semester.
Senior Dan Schoening, one of the system's organizers, said they saw a need for a more reliable system.
"We haven't really found that [the JoeyTracker] was always available when we needed it," he said. "It's definitely a work in progress, too, and it's going to be great when they get it going, but in the meantime … this provides a serious option."
Former TCU Senator Matt Shapanka (LA '09), who oversaw the JoeyTracker project during his time at Tufts, said that the system he helped create works off of reliable, hard-wired GPS units. "The hardware and Web site are excellent," he said.
Shapanka said he believes the source of the difficulty this year has been that the bus company does not always plug in the GPS systems. Shapanka said Joey drivers sometimes unplug the devices to start the diesel engines, especially on cold mornings.
"If you have something drawing electricity from the battery, it's harder to turn the bus on," he explained. Once the shuttle is revved up, Shapanka added, the GPS units might mistakenly remain disconnected.
But the testimonies of Joey drivers throw doubt on Shapanka's argument. Ed Marchant, a driver who covers weekend shifts, said that the GPS units light up whenever the bus is started, and drivers never switch off the buses' engines during the course of the day.
"I never unplug it," Marchant said of his bus' GPS unit, which he thought was internally connected to the bus and could not easily be detached.
Marchant was not aware that the devices were not operating normally, nor had he been alerted of the current problems with the JoeyTracker.
Another driver, who asked to remain anonymous because he did not believe he was authorized to speak on the record about his work, has been steering the shuttle for three years. He said he was instructed by the Joseph's Limousine company to make sure the two red lights on the GPS unit are always on, an indicator that the unit is functioning. Still, even after the driver verified the red lights, the JoeyTracker did not register the information.
The idea of having GPS units inside shuttles originated from a Senate initiative started by Shapanka to quell student complaints that the shuttle was frequently tardy.
"One of the big issues was that everyone was kind of annoyed that the Joey would be late or never run on time," Shapanka said.
With the JoeyTracker, the Senate is "trying to make the use of the Joey service as seamless as possible and as easy as possible," said Greenberg.
Senators view the JoeyTracker as a tool to be used not just for convenience, but also wellbeing. "Safety is a bigger and bigger issue at Tufts," said Greenberg, a sophomore. "We don't want students waiting for a bus they don't know is coming," particularly when they are alone late at night or standing in inclement weather, he said.
Alexandra Bogus contributed reporting to this article.
