Not long ago, some friends and I -- all freshmen -- embarked on a journey to that castle of corporatism: Wal-Mart. Impressed by what we heard during Dimensions, we decided to try out Dartmouth's "awesome" and "easy to use" public transportation system, Advance Transit.
According to Mapquest.com, the Wal-Mart in West Lebanon is 5.91 miles away from the Hanover Inn: a ride of nine minutes. Doing some math, it should take 18 minutes in transit for my friends and I to go to Wal-Mart and back. The key word in that last sentence is "should." For less than 30 minutes of shopping, my friends and I spent four hours in transit.
I would like to pause on that for dramatic effect. Four hours.
From here I could easily argue whether or not it is Dartmouth's duty to effectively transport its students to Wal-Mart, whether or not Wal-Mart is a positive institution of American commerce, or whether or not it is more cost effective to shop in town in light of the ridiculous transit time. But I'm not going to. Dartmouth uses Advanced Transit as its solution to the problem of transporting students without access to cars into town. The college touts this solution to perspective students and boasts of its effectiveness. The issue I take here is that Advance Transit is not a solution, and it is by no means effective.
High prices and a lack of variety in Hanover and on campus compel many students to go to West Lebanon to get things like food, electronics, clothes or furniture for their rooms. Advance Transit, for some reason, does not operate on weekends when students have the most free time to go, and thus forces them to plan their trips around their classes. The route that Advance Transit suggests students take to go to West Lebanon involves changing buses, both ways, with up to a 50 minute wait in between.
There are a number of options that could correct this issue. Dartmouth could just come out and tell prospective students that there is no effective school-sponsored transportation system to go to town. Or, the College could work with Advance Transit to create quicker routes to the shopping centers. Or maybe most effectively, Dartmouth could run vans or buses back and forth on the weekends and offset the cost in part by charging for tickets. Like everyone else, I would rather not have the college spend more (and then pass it along to me in my tuition), but if this is a worthwhile expenditure for the sake of student life, shouldn't we reprioritize to somehow make it happen?
The fact that this is a problem puts us as a College at a disadvantage to rival institutions where transportation is not an issue. The occasional trip to Wal-Mart is not going to upset the "small town" atmosphere of the school and telling falsehoods to prospies is not going to give us the moral high ground either. Dartmouth deserves better.
It was sometime during out final shuttle back to school in the dead of night that my friends and I were reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey." We thought it was funny that in a 1960s view of what it would be like in 2001, there were shuttles going back and forth to the moon, while in the real world, five years after that, Dartmouth College -- the birthplace of artificial intelligence no less -- could not even adequately transport its students back and forth from Wal-Mart.