When I was in school at the University of Michigan, I lived at Bursley Hall for a year. With most of my courses on Central Campus, this meant that I got promptly acquainted with the bus system which took me to class every morning and brought me home every night. (Almost every night; once in a while I'd stay out late, and have to walk home through a deserted construction site where a new University Hospital was being built.)

From time to time I've taken bus trips for AnnArbor.com and annotated what I see along the way. The route to North Campus was familiar to me once, but it's a rare treat to ride a big blue bus these days. Here's what I saw on my way to North Campus.

Riding the bus

I picked up bus 3010 at the corner of Olivia and Hill Street. It was running the Oxford route, which goes every 10 minutes during the day.

I knew that I was early for the next bus because I looked up its location on Magic Bus, the service that the University runs which tracks real-time location of its entire fleet. Reachable from both smart phones and not so smart phones as well as from a web interface, this handy service lets you know not only where the bus is but also some estimate of when it will be where you are. That let me decide that it was worth waiting two minutes for the bus to come, rather than making an eight-minute hike across South University to get to the transit center.

The university bus system is completely free. You don't need to show ID to get on, and you can board at either door. Quite a few people assume that you have to have some kind of U-M affiliation to ride, but that's just not so. A moment's reflection makes that make sense: the system needs to service not only current students, faculty, and staff, but also campus visitors.

Hill Street to Central Campus Transit Center via Oxford

I boarded at Olivia Street. There were two other people on the bus.

The Oxford route replaces the Link Bus route, which used to loop around downtown before looping around campus. That route was canceled last summer after the Ann Arbor DDA pulled funding for it in June. The University of Michigan kept its portion of the service running by reconfiguring its routes to add a loop route covering just its piece of the old system.

We pass The Rock, which is painted yellow with red letters. It reads PCT, perhaps with some other lettering? It's hard to know what the message is, and I'm unlikely to find out before the rock is painted again and again.

On Washtenaw, there's a yard sign: Save Huron Hills / No Golf Strip Mall.

Just to the east of the corner of Hill and Oxford, there's construction in the street with a flagger controlling traffic. I looked for an explanation on the city road closings map, but I didn't see one, and I must have just missed what this was about.

At Oxford Housing, one passenger departs and six get on. This is a time point for the bus, so it waits patiently for bundled up people to run out and get on. Oxford Housing, built in 1963, is a series of eight squat settlements, currently used to house about 375 freshmen.

Across the street from Oxford Housing is Wallace House, home of the Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship.

We turn down South University. Two AT&T bucket trucks are on one side of the street. We go past Blunderstone Rookery and Angell Elementary School.

Two more people get on at South University Park at the corner of Walnut Street. No one on the bus looks particularly awake, except the driver. Unlike on the city buses that I am used to riding, there is no animated conversation among regulars who always ride the same bus together.

We turn down Washtenaw Avenue. Out my window I see the Mud Bowl, the site of "the dirtiest game in Ann Arbor". The ground is covered with a light dusting of snow, and if there is any mud there it's frozen to a crust.

An inflated Santa looks down from the rooftop at 1315 Washtenaw.

At Geddes, we turn and stop at the Central Campus Transit Center. All but three people get off, and two people get on. The bus changes its header to read Northwood Express.

At the Central Campus Transit Center

The CCTC, as it will inevitably be called by acronym-happy academics, is relatively quiet at 9 a.m. I also go past this spot just after 5 p.m. as northward bound students line up to get on the bus to Bursley, waiting under the new shelters.

Most of the construction at this center, which cost $4.5 million, is complete. What is missing is the final setup of the computer hardware and software that will put real time displays of both university and city bus arrival and departure information on overhead and streetside displays. The goal, as I understand it, is for the place to look like a modern transportation hub and not just a warming hut.

If you ride the bus all the time, most of signs are superfluous, since you are likely to be taking the same route all the time. The first time rider benefits the most from good displays of transit information, if only to give him confidence that he can get where he is going and also get back.

Central Campus Transit Center to Medical Campus

Now labeled the Northwood Express, Bus 3010 doesn't linger at the transit center before heading out. The next bus on this route will arrive in another 10 minutes, and several other routes also end up at the North Campus Commons. Taking a bus to North Campus is infinitely easier than trying to find a place to park.

The bus turns the corner and heads down Fletcher Street. We pass the Kellogg Institute, built in 1938 or 1939 on the former site of Prettyman's Boarding House.

At Washington Street, the bus stops to pick up three more passengers. Across the street is the Rackham Building, built on the site which was once Michigan's oldest Jewish cemetery. On this side of the street, the Power Center is located in what was once Felch Park, and a historical marker commemorates former Michigan governor Alpheus Felch (1804-1896).

We head down Huron Street and turn at Glen, passing the Biomedical Science Research Building. The Kahn Auditorium, fondly known as "The Pringle" for its distinguished shape, is the landmark at this corner. The BSRB replaced a small commercial cluster at this corner, including the Kana restaurant which I remember for its home style Korean food and its plum tea.

Two pieces of Univeristy scuplture grace Glen Street. At Ann Street, see the shiny, spiky Flame of Wisdom, designed by Leonardo Nierman. At Catherine, underneath the pedestrian overpass, locate the bronze nudes of Regeneration of Time, by Louis Marinaro

Also gracing Glen Street are several vacant lots, the proposed home of the perpetually stalled Glen Ann Place. extension yyy.

Medical Campus to North Campus via Fuller Road

After crossing the Norfolk Southern railroad tracks, the bus route continues past Fuller Park. The stretch of land between the road and the tracks has a park-like soccer field and a distinctively un-park-like parking lot, used as a university lot during the week. This is the site of the proposed Fuller Road Transit Station.

On the other side of the tracks up on the hill a Survival Flight helicopter is visible on its landing pad.

Fuller Road crosses the Huron River. A stream gauge is just upstream; this morning it registers 12.87 feet, which corresonds to a flow of 574 cubic feet per second. (Flood stage is 16 feet; no risk of that today).

Passing Mitchell Field, we see more soccer fields, and more parking.

The bus turns up Bonisteel Boulevard, and I exit at the corner.

I must have taken this route 500 times, so the 20-minute journey didn't seem like any time at all; but it took more than an hour and a half to get all of the details noted; and as I read through this account, I see dozens more things worth noting.

Edward Vielmetti rides the bus for AnnArbor.com.