Rasika has a great chat with Dr. Ken Anderson about the creation of CAMBUS, the University of Iowa’s free bus service, and how access to free, convenient public transportation benefits the larger Iowa City community as well.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Hello, everyone and welcome back to From the Front Row. Today we are delighted to have Dr. Ken Anderson on the show. Dr. Anderson is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of Iowa. He’s also the Director of the Executive MHA Program. He’s also one of the founders of the CAMBUS, which is a free public bus system that primarily serves the University of Iowa campus and the Iowa City area. I’m Rasika Mukkamala and if it’s your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student-run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they’re relevant to anyone and everyone, both inside and outside of the field of public health. Welcome to the show, Dr. Anderson. Thank you for joining the show. Dr. Anderson. I’m sure that many of our listeners use the CAMBUS every day. Can you talk a little bit about how the CAMBUS program started?

Ken Anderson:

Well, I’m going to call the way we started this just a wonderful accident. But as it turns out, I think it’s grown into something that’s really provided a valuable service for our students, and in fact, the entire community. The origins are somewhat haphazard in the sense, in the early 1970s we had a thought that we wanted to mirror what other cities were growing into with respect to mass transit. It was a time when we were really largely focused on a lot of issues of social responsibility, and so we were trying to think that transportation was a way of minimizing what was the carbon footprint at that time, even before we started talking about it in a way. But also at the same point in time, of building a community of users of mass transit that would collate our community and bring our community together, and would also provide some way as a great academic institution, we could stream more people’s knowledge so that perhaps their acceptance of mass transit in the future would be very strongly received.

When I say it’s a bit of an accident, I will say it because there was a desire that sort of strung forward organically of trying to find one way of getting from one part of campus to another. And really the Residence Hall Association did a really nice job of coalescing this [inaudible 00:02:28] because we were in the middle of the winter in Iowa, trying to find ways of getting people from the west side of campus, particularly undergraduates, to the east side of campus where most of their classes occurred. And so a lot of it was just trudging either across the river, across the bridges, but some people had an idea that maybe if we could get a school bus somehow we could get people moving back and forth across the river.

So, that was something that came about in 1970, 1971 timeframe. And then, it had some benefits sort of organically [inaudible 00:00:21] us. And so, one of the things that came up was that, well imagine if we were to [inaudible 00:03:11] instead of just having a bus run between residence halls, imagine if we took it upon ourselves to find a student-owned and operating bus system, where we could do ahead and help ourselves and help our community to… This single bus moving back and forth across the river. And, a really wise undergraduate student at the time who was in the business school came forward with a TV station, I think it was KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids, and asked them to come down and film this one bus in motion, and it showed students standing and freezing waiting, and it was wonderfully snowing at the time. It was the perfect scenario so that when people who saw that news story saw that there was some idea that maybe a campus bus system be a positive thing.

It created this groundswell of support. So we were looking for donations to get the thing rolling, and in fact, parents and grandparents were seeing this, and they would see students standing there shivering and getting on this bus and… “This is a good idea I can get behind.” So, there was an initial bond of maybe we could go ahead and just do this through voluntary donations. And, I think there were many of us who realized that was a non-sustainable proposition. So, I happened to be on the students at the time and I was running a ticket that was with a group of people called the [inaudible 00:04:44], and there were five co-presidents of the undergraduate school, and many of them were from urban areas and understood the idea of what bus systems and train systems to do. And so they got behind it and I got behind it as a member of student senate. And so we pulled some money out of our coffers to provide the first seed money for campus to get rolling back in 1972.

So in the late winter, early spring of ’72, we put together some money along with some money coming through the residence hall associations. And then we had a really strong university president supporter of student activities at that time by the name of Dr. Sandy Boyd, Willard Boyd. And he said, “Well, we’ll commit some money from the University of Iowa as well.” And lo and behold, what happened came at it from multiple sources we started getting rolling with the possibility of it could be a bus system. We’ll talk a little bit more in terms of where it sort of came from, and it’s an [inaudible 00:05:46] its naming and so forth, but that was the origin zone.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Yeah, no, that’s a great story. I think a lot of people, myself included, use the CAMBUS and it’s really cool to hear how it started because it’s kind of had a life of its own before the modern iteration nowadays. So it is really cool to hear that it started with just a student idea, really.

Ken Anderson:

Yeah. We had this wacky idea, I think back in the 1970s, we as students probably thought, a lot of ourselves, that we could probably do anything to change the world. So it was a time of high social activities, and we thought this great way for our students to help ourselves and to help the community. And so it had a tendency to sort of grow, and the next step we had was, well, how do we make this sustainable? And that’s where I brought forward this idea through student senate of perhaps if students could put some financial muscle behind this, since we have a lot of students on campus reach a little bit for each of the students, we could probably make enough to make this sustainable. And so the idea of proposing a student fee that he needed to sustain CAMBUS was something that got a lot of debate and the students senate and the student [inaudible 00:07:08]. Overall, we took it to the students, we asked the students about and they said, well, we see the value in it.

This seems to be something that’s good for all of us and good for our community. So they are behind the idea of a student fee, which is, at first I think it was quite low. It was like a buck and a quarter, buck and a half for each student per a semester. Then they gave the seed money to develop a budget, actually turn this into a sustainable and working idea. So we started with, as I mentioned, this little school bus that ran back and forth across the campus. And we went forward and we said, well, maybe there is an idea that if what we did is we took some buses, we leased them to purchase them, and took this couple hundred thousand dollars budget that we had from the sources I originally had talked to them and put that together. And we had fairly cheap labor.

So our thought was we’ll have student bus drivers, them not only agreed opportunity to learn something to be employed, but it’ll be cheap labor as well. And then we started these three routes that were started up. The first was this inner door route, which was mirrored after the first school bus and then the other two routes, one that ran clockwise and one that ran counterclockwise on campus that we called the red route and the blue route. We said, there’s our bus system, we have it set, we’ve got student drivers, we’ve got some buses now. We’ve got routes and utilization, perhaps sustainability in terms of where we are. It was a lot of fun. The university always had a long reputation of having great artists that are here. And so we said, as we got these buses, we said, well, let’s make them distinctively our buses.

And so we painted them white on the top, and then there was a black stripe and yellow on the bottom, much like the color [inaudible 00:09:01] that’s still on campus today. And then we let the students in the art department say, well, what would you like to do to the front of these buses? So there were students who came forward and they painted like a dog face on one bus. They printed a smiley face on another bus. They painted a kind of growling smile on another bus. And that kind of gave it a distinctive lead and operated and maintained kind of a feeling to it. And I just remember, it was kind of funny because a couple of years later, those buses appeared in some national news stories.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Wow.

Ken Anderson:

So there was just a wonderfully brilliant newspaper called the National [inaudible 00:09:48]. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of [inaudible 00:09:53] was really big about sensational stories. And so they had heard about these buses, and so they asked if we would stage a picture, which we did. We pulled a couple of buses coming up the street towards what would’ve been the old Field House, and they took a picture [inaudible 00:10:09]. It was of two of these buses with faces. One had a smile, so one had this gnarly growly smile and it appeared [inaudible 00:10:20]. So I think the Iowa bus system, got quite a bit of its reputation out of that.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Yeah, no, that’s great. When you and the team started talking about this, I know social determinants of health is kind of a buzzword that kind of started recently, and I know you kind of mentioned social policy, but what kinds of things were you hoping to address with the CAMBUS other than just kids not being the cold in the winter? Were there any underlying factors that you were trying to address?

Ken Anderson:

Sure. I think kids not being in the cold was really a big driver, but as I mentioned at the time, we were kind of growing up at the time of large scale social responsibility. The [inaudible 00:11:06] was going on. There was a lot of concern about the environment that was going on. So some of the other drivers that happened, they were part of the origins of CAMBUS for us, this idea about becoming of our own destiny, students owning and operating and sort of becoming our own community, taking care of ourselves and taking care of each other in the broadest definition of what social responsibility is for communities. I think we were really interested in that. I think a second part is that we wanted to show that there was an opportunity for not only our community, the community in and around the University of Iowa could benefit from having mass transit expanded somewhat akin to what was found in other cities where we could actually decrease the print that was with everybody driving all over the place.

So we were already a fairly pedestrian, bicycle rich community. But this is one more way of trying to help boost this idea of pulling ourselves as… And I guess I’ll say finally, in a lot of towns, universities reside, there is what I’ll call an unnatural tendency to draw this artificial line between town and gallon, where the concerns of the town are very distinctively different than the concerns of the universities that are residing in those towns. Our belief was we are all are linked. So when we thought about this idea about who could set foot on a bus, we said, well, [inaudible 00:12:41] can set foot on a bus. We’re all one community. So it really, I think helped to reach out, cement, the relationship between the University… Iowa City by saying we’re all one. So I think there was that, and I think leading the lessons of what mass transportation was was a key driver for everybody to kind of move forward in their lives as they graduate from the University of Iowa to imagine what their communities might do if they wanted to think about something similar.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Yeah, no, that’s great. One question that I had for you was how did the name CAMBUS come to be? Was it always called the CAMBUS or was it called something different? How did that name come about?

Ken Anderson:

Well, I think this is a really cool part of the origins of CAMBUS, again, from the very nature of what it was as a student led, owned and operated kind of organization, we decided, well, since it’s really about us, maybe the name should come from us.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Oh, yeah.

Ken Anderson:

So we sort of thought, well, I guess we can ask around and see who has great ideas, and the students then can ask, and this cooperative co-presidents can ask and we’ll come up with something brilliant. And of course, we had not. And so the next thing which was from a crowdsourcing perspective, one of the smartest things we did is that we opened it up to the community to sort of say, well name your bus system. After all it’s [inaudible 00:14:17] for us and about us, so you should be having the voice and naming this bus system. So we held a contest.

We actually received what we thought was a wonderful name. It was called CAMBUS. It was named after our region in Europe, which was highly focused on mass transportation. And so CAMBUS was a shortened version of that. We thought, well, CAMBUS, campus bus, that makes good sense. And so this was something that came organically, again, from just a student. And of course as students, we had huge dollars to put in for this competition. Well, not really. So the winner of the CAMBUS, which to this day probably if you were to hold a marketing campaign and come up with what’s the name and you would come up with CAMBUS and it would be hundreds of thousands of dollars for a marketing campaign to come up with this one point, the winner of the naming competition, who was one of the students, received a pizza.

Rasika Mukkamala:

You know, college students will really do anything for food.

Ken Anderson:

You’re right. College students will do anything for food. [inaudible 00:15:37] how brilliant somebody could be at home sitting in his dorm or apartment and sort of be a believer in this system to say, I’ll sit a couple minutes thinking about this, and of course the prize is wonderful. You get a free pizza out of this. And so that’s how…

Rasika Mukkamala:

Wow, that’s great. Were there any other contenders that you thought about?

Ken Anderson:

I mean, everybody wanted to have some kind of a variant of student or campus or mass transit or bus, but this was the one that stood out because it really stood for something bigger than it was just as it stood for almost an international view of what mass transit could mean to a community. And I think combining the very things we were looking for, which was our campus, which was an organic idea that we had, that we were a part of, that we were this community called the campus and it was a bus system. So CAMBUS won the day.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Yeah. I can’t imagine it being called any different. So it’s a great-

Ken Anderson:

Me neither. Me neither. Just as I mentioned, I think you give students a little bit of an incentive, particularly [inaudible 00:16:50].

Rasika Mukkamala:

Yes.

Ken Anderson:

And you give them an opportunity to be a part of something far bigger than they and they can accomplish great things. So this is one of coming forward to help the buses.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Yeah. When you and the team kind of came up with this idea, what was your goal immediately? Did you realize how much of a legacy and impact it would continue to have? I know you mentioned there was three routes, and we still have all three of those routes, but now there’s so many more. Some of them go to the research park in Coralville across town. Did you really anticipate any of those things happening? What was your impact that you wanted to create?

Ken Anderson:

Not a chance we had this vision so well calculated and it well thought out. This was something… It was just a wonderful accident, how it happened to begin with. And this little organic seed funding that came up and this idea about leasing buses that we painted and said… This was about as big as we ever could have dreamt that we were going to get with this. And so when we had six buses and we had three routes, we said, all right, now let’s move on to the next thing. That’s as big as this thing is ever going to get. We’re done.

I think this… Clearly, as I’ve been away from the university for quite a few years and then coming back and even now return visits, I’d be back here for a summer education I’d take or where the writer’s workshop classes and I’d see these buses go by. And I remember thinking to myself, this was certainly not what we had ever envisioned, that we’d have these big fancy buses and bionic buses for people who needed special arrangements for transportation. This was in no way what we had envisioned when we thought about how do I get a student safely through the winter from one part of the campus to the next? That was all we had sort of set our minds to in terms of trying to solve the problem though.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Yeah. And I think now too, I’ve seen for football shuttles and the basketball games, they’ll also utilize the CAMBUSes. So it really is much bigger than I say… It really is the community and the extended community too. Especially if people are traveling into Iowa City to support the Hawks, they could use that system too. And I think it kind of builds community, especially when people are going to the games and things like that. You always see people wearing Hawkeye gear and it’s kind of nice to see people who you might not know but are all coming together for kind of one cause.

Ken Anderson:

So true. You mentioned the research part and then you mentioned people going to games. This was clearly an expression of this little seed idea that then… Well students sort of continuing to provide inputs and imagination and creativity and more thought in terms of where this might go. The students have done such a great job of extending the utility of this. So when we think about it as solving some social determinants issues like transportation being one of them, [inaudible 00:19:59] people going to their jobs. So going to [inaudible 00:20:02]. You find people who are going to sports and recreation activities, you find people going to their medical appointments. So the print of this on our community is so solid and visible, we realize that it becomes just a part of who we are as a community.

Sort of a humorous story. I happened to be standing at a CAMBUS stop, it must’ve been last winter, and a couple with three of their children were there and they all had their Hawkeye gear and they were getting ready to go to a woman’s basketball game. Basketball [inaudible 00:20:39] as of course, a lot of people do these days. But [inaudible 00:20:43]. Can you point us out to Carver Hawk Arena? I go, well, it’s the Crest River, it’s up this hill and blah, blah, blah. And the little kids were going, “Mom, it’s cold outside. It’s so cold, and can we park out there?” And I said, “I don’t know if you noticed or not, but there’s a bus system that runs through the campus. It’ll take care right up to the Carver Hawk Arena.” And they… Oh, this is terrific. And so the first question they asked is, after, will I get us there on time for the game and so forth and so on, and where do you stop and is there a schedule? But the next question they asked is, so how much does it cost? And I said, “Well, it’s free.” They could not believe it that we could have something like on our campus. They were from [inaudible 00:21:34] but I thought, what a great testimonial to what the students are doing, either [inaudible 00:21:41] to have our community seen so visibly as a positive place to be.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Yeah, I totally agree. And hearing you say that kind of makes me think about accessibility and how it really… Having the Cambus available, especially for students who maybe our international students and don’t have a car. I know there’s one that runs two apartment complexes and things like that. So it really does, I think, increase accessibility of education to people in the sense of that you don’t need a car to get around Iowa City. This can supplement you. So if that’s the kind of determining factor of you coming to the University of Iowa, it’s not really a problem. And I think now that all the routes have been expanded, it really does take you from one side of town to the other. And you kind of mentioned patients at the hospital, there’s really an ability for them to get there a lot easier. And employees too, especially from the Hawk Lot and things like that. So I really think it really does change, I think people’s view of what public transport can do. Because a lot of people think like, oh, the subway in New York or the metro system in DC. But really this is solving that problem of transportation in Iowa City and while it might not be underground like it is in other cities, this is what works for Iowa City. And I think it’s great that it was actually student created too.

Ken Anderson:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. I think the organic nature of is what gives us this really distinctive nature of bringing the community together around as this campus bus system. And I really, as an educator now myself, one of the things find tempting is to just get involved with the kinds of things that I educate about. But one of the things that I also find very appetizing for myself is in the College of Public Health, I looked at education very broadly. And what does it mean to be educated? Well, I think there’s things that are in a textbook or things that are in lectures and so forth, but there’s a lot of education that happens from your time spent in the community. And I think that’s what we’re doing now, is we’re educating people about bigger issues that are really involved in every community. And that is how do you tackle things that are [inaudible 00:24:09] hunger and joblessness and housing and transportation. So this gives a bit of a model where people could begin to educate themselves, dream bigger about some of these issues every day they wrestle.

Rasika Mukkamala:

I totally agree with you. So my last question for you is something that we ask all of our podcast guests and your answer can be related to the CAMBUS, related to healthcare or just life lessons in general. But what is one thing that you thought you knew but were later wrong about?

Ken Anderson:

I would say that I and many others of us went through a period of time where we thought we could take on anything and everything in the world and solve it. And I think what we realized is all of these things take a heavy lift over a long period of time. And I think what I was wrong about at the time was that if we just push hard and push this stone up the hill and just are all committed to it it’ll change tomorrow. We’ll get to the top of the hill. And even with something as wonderful as CAMBUS, when we pushed it to the top of the hill, we realized there was yet another hill in front of us. I think what I learned was this concept related to patience, persistence, that great ideas should be [inaudible 00:25:39] but also that there is a certain restlessness you need to maintain, but you need to maintain that over time in a persistent patient [inaudible 00:25:49] to really get across the next hurdle and then the next hurdle and then the next hurdle. So that’s what I learned, particularly through this experience.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Yeah, thank you so much for being on the podcast. For our listeners, be sure to check out the CAMBUS and the transit app and please join us next time for our next episode. Thank you.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s it for episode this week. Big thank you to Dr. Anderson for joining us today. This episode was hosted and written by Rasika Mukkamala and edited and produced by Lauren Lavin. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team, you can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode is brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.