Boston University students frequent the areas outside the campus proper at all hours every day of the week. Students’ study, socializing and work schedules are not limited by public and school-supported transportation schedules that end around midnight. Urban criminals, about whom the administration often warns, remain active late into the night, even when the BU Shuttle does not.
Most BU students have taken notice of an efficient and far-reaching university transportation service that crisscrosses the Charles River Campus. The fleet of shuttles and buses employed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology connects and supports its far-flung student population. Besides convenience, the shuttle service provides its students with a safe way home every night, wherever they are.
BU offers a more do-it-yourself approach to on- and around-campus transport. After the T and the BUS, which makes a miserable seven stops on the main campus and two in the Medical Campus, stop running, students are left to their feet, bikes or pricey cab rides to get around.
The underused Escort Security Service, which offers a safe walk to campus for students in the area, ends operation at 3 a.m. on the weekend. The administration cut the Escort Security Service van that was used to pick up and drop off students around campus in fall 2006, claiming this was a budget cut students could bear. Besides, it’s been said, students abused the safety service as a taxi service.
Whether the van was transporting studying honors students or taxiing around intoxicated co-eds, it still got students home safely. Until it’s financially feasible for the MBTA to extend its late-night operation, the university should pick up the slack in heavily student-populated areas. With reported crime on the rise in South Campus and Allston, the school must find the funds to bring back what was once a well-used service.
When students most need safe transportation — between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. when parties wind down and criminal activity is up, according to recent trends — it’s tough to get a ride. Taxicab services usually require longer waits than impatient students will tolerate. Faced with no public transportation, a 45-minute delay, or one’s own feet, many students with impaired judgment will take the latter.
With the administration dropping the ball on a critical safety issue, the Student Union has attempted to tackle transportation problems with a proposal to link Convenience Points and taxi fare. This misguided idea neglects both the unavailability of cabs in the city at closing time, and the fact that the school should provide this transportation service to students — not simply facilitate students footing a high bill themselves.
Though the budgeting process that killed the Escort van has already concluded for next year, student groups and the Union can take up this critical cause. They should be unafraid to try new ideas, to even demand that part of the undergraduate student fee be allocated to the Escort Security Service to get the van up and running — even if BU cannot afford MIT’s commodious services. Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore said a dialogue about the gap in safe transportation has begun; students should hold their dean to this claim in the next year.