Bus sign advertising space is on the interior of the blue campus buses. This service can be reserved for one week or an entire semester, as long as space remains available. You can reserve bus sign space for as many weeks as your budget permits, up to a semester at a time.
Reservations are accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis via SORC online reservation request. There are three reservation periods each year:
- The Fall period includes September through mid-January dates and opens in early July.
- The Winter period includes late January through early May dates and opens in early December.
- The Summer period includes early May through late September dates and opens in April.
Buses are large enough to accommodate roughly 520 inches (almost 43 feet) of advertisements each week. This varies a little bit, depending on what might fall down from previous weeks, but we accept reservations for up to 520 inches every week.
It is not possible to have a set of bus signs up one week, come down, and ask SORC to keep the signs for future use. If you have the need to place the same ads multiple weeks during the semester, it will probably be necessary to print more signs. Here's why:
- There are over 40 buses in the fleet; SORC accepts 30 signs for each group’s reservation.
- When SORC drivers visit the bus garages to put up new signs and take down old signs, 10 to 12 buses are usually in service, doing their routes on campus.
- Therefore, SORC drivers are not able to take down all old signs on the first try.
- It usually takes 2 or 3 visits to the garage before all of the old ones are located and taken down.
- Typically, this is no cause for concern with SORC customers because more exposure (free!) is generally better.
- However, if your group wants to get the signs back, this creates some challenges. You would need to stop at SORC multiple times (once every week) between reservations. After 3 visits, you should be able to get at least 20 of the signs back. But if there is a short gap between reservations, you will likely only get a few of the signs back in time.
Each organization/entity is limited to two sets of bus signs up per week due to space limitations. This means that with extended reservations of more than one month, new sets of bus signs can only be put up once/month to give us the necessary time it takes to get the previous ones down. Changing out bus signs more than this would mean your organization could have more than 2 bus signs up at once, causing space issues.
Advertisers may come in after their bus signs are scheduled to come down and sort through the pile, but it is unlikely that all 30 will be there, especially at first. The responsibility for retrieving them from the pile is on the advertiser; SORC does not provide this service.
Advertisers may come anytime during regular SORC hours and search through the pile of taken-down bus signs. Old signs are immediately placed "for sale" as recycled poster board, so it's best to come early.
- If your signs were scheduled to come down on Sunday, the best time to come in and look through the pile would be Sunday afternoon or Monday morning.
- Even though your signs are in the "for sale" pile, you do not have to pay for them. You can always take back your group's signs for free, no matter how old.
Finally, some signs fall down or get taken down by the drivers if they sag or a corner gets pulled out of the track. On rare occasions, some signs are actually taken by riders of the buses. So even if you come in repeatedly and check the "taken down" pile, bear in mind that you might only get 15-20 signs back.
For these reasons, if you have a reservation for multiple time periods, you need to submit different sets of bus signs.