Picture this: It’s the end of the semester. You’ve just finished your last final, on the last night of finals. It’s 9:30 pm. Maybe you did well, maybe not so well. You want nothing more than to grab your bags and get on the bus, train, or flight headed home. It’s the holiday season and you want to be home with your family as soon as you can. But you can’t. There are no more shuttles going to the stations.
RPI is, on the whole, very good about transportation services, with free shuttle service to the Greyhound and Amtrak stations, and to the Albany Airport. Now, I can’t speak for other semesters, but this time, shuttle service to the airport ends an hour and a half before the last finals end, and service to the train and bus stations ends two and a half hours before the finals end.
But, you might say, can’t you simply finish the final early? For those who are taking a train or a bus home, like me, that means finishing the final in less than half an hour. It’s sort of like all the campus construction fin
ishing by tomorrow: it’s just not going to happen.
There are two options left: stay one more night and go home on the 17th, or find alternate means of transportation to the bus station, train station, or airport. This is where taxis come in. These are viable options. But that’s not the point of this editorial. The point of this editorial is that if RPI is going to provide a shuttle service so its students can get home and back to school, then it should actually provide that service and not end it before the last finals are given.
By providing just two more shuttles, one at 9 pm and one at 10 pm, all this mess can be avoided. Students can be home with their families sooner, and the cost of a taxi can be avoided. I honestly can’t imagine that the cost of those two shuttles being worth more than being home with friends and family even a little sooner.
