photo by: Associated Press

A bus passes in front of Strong Hall on Nov. 16, 2015, on the University of Kansas campus.

Those hoping to catch a bus during the evening hours in Lawrence will soon have some additional options.

The city of Lawrence coordinates its bus service with the University of Kansas, and seven routes that include campus stops will soon run later into the evening, according to a city news release. The changes extend bus service on six routes until 10 p.m. during the academic year and provide a late-night route on weekends.

Zachary Kelsay, a first-year law student from Independence, Mo., was the transportation coordinator for Student Senate when the changes were discussed. Kelsay said many KU students are on campus late for evening classes, club meetings or other activities, and once bus service stopped in the evenings, many people were either walking home or getting rides from friends.

“On Jayhawk Boulevard, there would be a long line of cars just waiting to pick people up,” Kelsay said. “That’s not really the kind of access we want to promote. We’d rather have a way for students to get home just like they would during the day.”

The additional evening hours for certain city-KU coordinated bus routes are the result of the discontinuation of KU SafeBus, a late-night bus service mostly for KU students, according to an announcement on the university’s website. The SafeBus service only provided rides to KU students with a valid KU Card and friends traveling with them, according to rules for the service. That service was essentially folded into the wider service, providing more hours of service overall and making the service available to the community at large.

Once the route changes go into effect, six routes that currently make their last stops anywhere between 6 and 8 p.m. will now run until about 10 p.m. during the academic year. Route 44, which Lawrence Transit Administrator Bob Nugent said will run between campus and downtown, will operate until 3 a.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.

The routes extended until 10 p.m. include two routes, 11 and 29, that are jointly funded by the city and KU, according to Nugent. Route 11 runs from South Iowa Street to KU to downtown, and route 29 runs from 27th Street and Wakarusa Drive to KU. The city news release noted that the changes “will allow for more choices and less confusion by bus riders who wish to ride after-hours.”

The majority of bus trips citywide derive from KU routes. There were about 3.1 million annual trips on the coordinated bus system last year, and KU riders made close to 2 million of those, or about 60 percent, according to annual ridership numbers.

The university is covering the additional costs to extend the routes’ service hours. Margretta de Vries, transit analyst for KU Parking and Transit, said that KU is funding the additional service hours by using the student fee dollars previously devoted to the SafeBus service. She said the extended hours also close a gap in service, from about 6 to 10:30 p.m., between bus routes and the ongoing KU SafeRide program, which provides late-night car rides for students on weekends.

“So we are transforming SafeBus to fill those hours on all of the KU-funded off-campus routes,” de Vries said.

There will also be changes to several other routes with KU stops in order to realign them to serve the new KU Central District, according to the release. Apart from those adjustments, Nugent said changes to some routes, such as those made to routes 3 and 36, shifted those routes away from areas with low ridership to better serve higher-ridership areas.

“We are always looking to fine-tune our routes the best that we possibly can to get the biggest bang for our buck, and we do that on both sides,” Nugent said. “We’re always chasing ridership; if we find low portions of ridership on a route, we are going to look for other places that might have ridership.”

Nugent said the changes to city routes will go into effect Aug. 1, and those to KU routes will begin with the start of the fall semester on Aug. 20. The city’s new transit guide reflecting the route changes is available at several locations, including grocery stores, City Hall, Lawrence Public Library, KU campus and on all buses, according to the release, and at lawrencetransit.org.

A summary of the upcoming route changes is as follows:

• Routes 11, 29, 30, 34, 36, 38 and 44 will operate until 10 p.m. during KU’s fall and spring semesters.

• Route 44 will operate until 3 a.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday during KU’s fall and spring semesters.

• Route 3 will no longer serve Peterson Road, Kasold Drive or Lakeview Road.

• Route 36 will be split into two separate routes, route 34 and route 36.

• Routes 38, 41, 42, 43 will be realigned to serve the new KU Central District.