Starting the Wolfprowl Downtown Bus Route

Jay Dawkins remembers the events leading up to the foundation of the Wolfprowl bus to Downtown Raleigh and it's inaugural trip.

Interview on 2014-05-21 00:00:00 -0400

Transcript

00:00:00.000 So Adam Compton had coined this term, "Wolfprowl," for this concept of having a downtown bus, and it had been in the works.
00:00:07.809 I think a lot of people had tried before, and it wasn't that I was any better of a student leader or more effective or had a better transportation chair,
00:00:15.408 but we stumbled upon the right timing with the transportation department, because they actually asked us: "Okay, we have a little bit of extra funding this year,
00:00:23.804 and we could add some new routes during the day, or shorten the lead time on some of these routes.
00:00:30.240 What do you guys think we should do?" And we go, "Oh, it's funny you ask. [Laughs] We were hoping we could get a bus downtown on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights."
00:00:40.798 They're like, "Oh. Yeah. We could probably do that," and we went, "Oh. Well, that's easy enough. Okay, let's do it."
00:00:48.756 And so we kind of went into the marketing mode for it and student government handled a lot of the graphics and pushing the word out about this thing. I remember the day that it launched we had a get-together at Talley
00:01:02.868 to greet the first Wolfprowl bus and ride it downtown. The problem was the driver that was driving the first Wolfprowl bus didn't know the route exactly yet,
00:01:10.774 it was the first time they'd done the route. So there is this pile of students, standing there at Talley all excited, we've got balloons, and there's cameras and we're about to hop on the bus. The bus comes pulling up; we're all getting excited; the bus drives up; the bus keeps going. [Laughs]
00:01:25.215 We're like, "Wait!" I can't remember if I was holding balloons or who was holding balloons but we just took off running after the bus, so you had these balloons chasing down the street after it to the next stop. Thankfully somebody flagged it down at Witherspoon where it stopped and we, out of breath, got on the Wolf Prowl and rode downtown.
00:01:44.836 I think we were all just so exhausted or excited about it, and I don't think I came home until like 1:30 or so that night. I'm sure there're some funny stories I don't remember. [Laughs] But it was a good way to celebrate the inaugural trip.