Elijah Noriega 
UTRGV – Earlier this month the VOLT carts were introduced to both Edinburg and Brownsville campus, eight of them are in Brownsville and fifteen in Edinburg.
“The premise behind volt is to target remote parking lots and try to incentivize students to actually use the remote parking lots to try to alleviate congestion, within the perimeter of the campus,” said Director of Transportation Services Gabriel Zuniga.
The VOLT carts are purchased through university’s funds and the staff and operations are funded through Valley Metro. Rick Anderson made the ultimate decision on purchasing 23 of the VOLT carts. Each of them at a price tag of $18,000 to a grand total of $414,000. That’s almost the amount of Guy Bailey’s salary. We went out to ask students on their opinions.
“From where I stand right now, I’ve never even heard of it or seen them, I haven’t seen anyone use them. So if it costs $414,000, it’s not helping me out, I don’t know what student it’s really helping out, the school is putting the money to good use, but obviously not all of it,” said mechanical engineering major Lucas Rios.
The carts include WiFi, GPS and three cameras that are recording for safety purposes.
Zuniga states in the future thy will have carts specifically for deviated routes.
“We are thinking of a deviated type of route for both Edinburg and Brownsville. We do have what we call a deviated service, it is signified through call stops on our maps, so people can call and say ‘Hey i need to go to this location’ we will deviate from the route to drop them off, but eventually we want to move away from that and have a dedicated person in cart specifically for that, that way we don’t have to deviate and we can keep our frequencies in check,” said Zuniga.
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