Campus & Beyond

Campus-to-Campus Bus Designs Meld Art and Transit

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By Joe Wilensky

Photography & videography by Jason Koski

You might spot it on the highway—breezing along Route 81 near Scranton or Route 80 in New Jersey, or rolling through the Lincoln Tunnel into NYC. It’s occasionally at rest, pausing to pick up or drop off passengers on the Hill or in Manhattan.

But wherever you may see it, the Campus-to-Campus Bus evokes your alma mater. It sports not just carnelian red and the University insignia, but panoramic views of the Upstate and Downstate campuses—a picturesque traveling postcard.

view of the Campus-to-Campus bus with its first wrap outside Grand Central Terminal in New York City — The debut wrap at Grand Central Terminal in 2011 ...

View of a Campus-to-Campus Bus in 2013 at the Sage Hall stop on the Ithaca campus — ... and a 2013 design outside Sage Hall.

Cornell launched the service (nicknamed C2C) in 2004, offering nonstop daily routes between the Ithaca campus and NYC, complete with wi-fi and comfortable seating.

Today, the fleet includes six 32-passenger buses that make 15 round trips weekly, with a reduced schedule in summer.

The fleet includes six 32-passenger buses that make 15 round trips weekly, with a reduced schedule in summer.

The service is available to the public, though Cornell-affiliated riders pay a lower fare. In the 2026 fiscal year, C2C tallied more than 30,000 passenger trips.

In addition to three stops on the Hill, the bus makes two in Manhattan: the Cornell Club in Midtown, and Weill Cornell Medicine on the Far East Side.

A timelapse of the newest design being applied.

The coaches initially sported just the C2C logo, but beginning in 2010, the University began giving them vinyl photographic wraps that transform them into stunning billboards, splashing views across the sides of the 45-foot-long vehicles.

The wraps are printed on a specialized 3M product that’s applied at the C2C facility just off campus. A wrap typically lasts a bus’s entire service life—about seven years and 400,000–500,000 miles—before it’s retired, says Billy Meade, C2C’s fleet manager.

Installation typically takes place over the course of two or three days, as pieces of the 1,200-square-foot wrap are carefully fitted to the bus’s sides and contours, and trimmed around ports and windows.

a Campus-to-Campus Bus, pictured in 2009, before they began using the wraps — Joe Wilensky / Cornell University

Red panels and University branding are added to the front and rear. The wrap is breathable, Meade notes, so air pockets can be eliminated during application.

“You can use heat to manipulate it to go around the corners, make it stretch a bit,” he says. “It’s tacky, so if you make a mistake, you can pull it away and rework the area.”

A wrap typically lasts a bus’s entire service life—about seven years and 400,000–500,000 miles.

Using images taken by the University’s photographers, the vibrant designs have typically juxtaposed a Big Apple view with similar Ithaca campus perspective.

Early versions featured both Upstate and Downstate on each side—with a visual transition, such as the branches of an Arts Quad tree fading into the deck of the Brooklyn Bridge—while more recent ones have put Ithaca on one side and NYC on the other.

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the ice resurfacer at Lynah Rink is pictured with a miniature version of the bus wrap the Campus-to-Campus Bus sports during the University’s sesquicentennial year in 2014–15 — Cornell Athletics

The newest design shows the Midtown skyline rising behind autumnal trees, while the opposite side features a similarly seasonal slice of the Arts Quad and Goldwin Smith.

“Cornellians love seeing the buses, taking photos of them, and recognizing some of the buildings,” Meade says. “As soon as people see it, they know it’s the Cornell Campus-to-Campus Bus.”