Students across St. Lawrence University are now restricted to one request for transport to bus, train and airline terminals beginning this semester, according to the university’s Transportation Services department.
Students were left shocked following an email received by many attempting to catch a ride in the past month, reading the following statement from the Transportation Services office: “Please be aware that this will be your one and only trip request for personal use this semester.”
“It just sucks to know that I’m going to have to start thinking of other ways to get home,” Mauricio Bustamante ’21 said, after stating his usual routine of making multiple trips every semester. “Sometimes the only thing that stops me from burning out is a well-timed [trip] to see my mom and friends back in NYC for a weekend.”
The seemingly new policy instituted by Transportation Services is not a new policy at all, coordinator Tonia Friot said.
“It always has been a rule,” Friot stated. “It just hasn’t always been enforced in the past.”
Friot said that whenever a student puts in a request for transportation during the semester, they provide ticket confirmation and schedule information from services such as Greyhound or JetBlue to dispatchers in the transportation office. The dispatchers then approve the request and match the student with a driver who will depart the university several hours before the departure time given by the ticket information provided.
“The problem lies in the trend of blatant abuse of Transportation Services we’ve been noticing over the last several years,” Friot claimed.
The Transportation Services office has investigated many instances of students who purposefully forge ticket confirmations from bus or airline companies in order to get transported numerous times a year to Syracuse and Montreal, Friot explained. These trips were not used as an opportunity to visit loved ones back home, but rather intentional lies meant to take advantage of the existing system.
“We know all about the students that use it for a weekend with friends at SU (Syracuse University) or a few weekend nights out in Montreal,” Friot explained. “Our transportation services are not for those types of things.”
A student who preferred to remain anonymous said that she has used the transport system for more than trips back home. However, she believed it was not any of the university’s business what she used the transportation service for.
“In my eyes, why should they care?” the student said. “As long as I’m paying for it at the end of the year, as long as I’m being respectful to the driver’s that take me, I shouldn’t have to worry about rationalizing my trip to anyone.”
In the end, Friot says the break rule should not discourage students from requesting transportation services.
“University policy ensures a round trip service for all university-sanctioned holidays, that won’t change,” Friot said, recommending that all other requests for transportation that go beyond the once-per-semester policy come through other offices on campus. “We always get requests from students through Dean Tolliver, or Tsewang Lama for international students visiting host families, or Career Services requesting transportation for job interviews and career fairs- these options are all still available.”
Transportation Services has begun taking numerous steps towards simplifying and improving the transportation system beyond the re-implementation of the “one-and-done for personal use” policy. The department has increased the number of drivers from five to 18 in the last eight years, and has also been working with the university’s IT department to build a new software that will allow for automatic tracking and verification of all ticket confirmation submissions. Friot expects the new system to go live at the end of the Spring 2019 semester.