This past Monday, I stepped onto an Advance Transit bus, the Upper Valley's free shuttle service, for my maiden voyage. Young and unseasoned, I fidgeted neurotically with my hands in my coat pockets as I stood at the bus stop in front of the Hopkins Center. The wind whipped up swirling dust clouds around the Hanover Inn construction site, but I felt none of it under the protection of the overhang. Four of us huddled together at the bus stop, periodically glancing at the conveniently placed LED screen that flashed approximate bus arrival times.
I had scanned the Advance Transit website before my journey to get the skinny. I'd known about the free service but not about the real-time bus tracking. I dug even deeper into Advance Transit through a series of rider surveys.
"It's fantastic that it's free," one Lebanon resident enthused.
So far, so good but how is the service itself on this public transportation?
"Everyone is treated respectfully," a West Lebanon resident said. Likely not my first thought about a service, but valid nonetheless.
Looking at the Advance Transit website's statistics on ridership, my suspicions were validated 13 percent of riders indicated they were Dartmouth students in 2008, and of those, only 19 percent were Dartmouth undergraduates. If you're quick with mental math, you know that means Dartmouth undergraduates comprise only about 2.5 percent of all ridership. If you're bad with mental math like me, you just know that the portion of the metaphorical ridership pie made up by Dartmouth undergraduates wouldn't even be worth taking to go.
I stood at the bus stop, peering up and down the road for our bus to arrive.
"I wouldn't know the first thing about riding Advance Transit," John Hill '12 said to me when I told him my day's plan. "I've never ridden it before in my life."
Ian Accomando '12 said his only experience with Advance Transit was when he used it to spend "a whole afternoon to go shopping" at West Lebanon's Walmart.
Accomando said he now believes that "it's probably faster to just take a bike."
In most conversations, Dartmouth students indicated they had used Advance Transit at least once.
"Yeah, of course I've taken the AT," Jon Katz '12 said. "Last term, it got out that there was a bus right after my class at the Life Sciences building, and the bus got crowded."
Dartmouth undergrads think of Advance Transit as an interesting shortcut. Students who live in the River cluster, for example, are notorious for hopping on the bus at just the right time to get a ride up Tuck Drive on lazy mornings.
It's fairly easy to understand why so few undergrads seriously incorporate Advance Transit into their transportation lives. This campus is compact, or at least the undergraduate piece of it is. Pick a spot on campus, draw courses out of a hat and in all probability you're five minutes or less from nearly any class, though the Life Sciences Center and the new Visual Arts Center are notable exceptions. Besides, cars are never all that far away if needed.
Grad students, on the other hand, ride Advance Transit four times more often than undergrads, according to the website, likely because so many of their classes are in more remote parts of Hanover. The service also reports heavy regular usage 82 percent of riders use the service three to five times a week hinting at the high volume of Upper Valley workers commuting to work.
I stepped onto the Advance Transit bus. It's a standard bus, shortened by a few yards. Standard in its amenities, but clean and polite. Four local residents waited for the boarders to be seated, and we were off for a pleasant ride. And to be honest, that will probably be my only ride while at Dartmouth. Perhaps I'm provincial, but my world doesn't regularly extend into the far reaches of the Upper Valley.
The world's about to get much larger after graduation in a way that's beyond my control. Advance Transit is a valuable service, but for now I plan on walking everywhere, to be outside as much as possible to absorb spring and to revel in the small size of Dartmouth while I still can.
