I walked out of the Student Union that night into the harsh, icy winds of a bitter winter evening and crossed Putnam Way for a late supper in The Commons. The wind whipped shards of snow at my face, as if the air were sprinting to keep itself warm on a night so cold you felt it in your bones. I remembered that I only had an hour or so before the last inbound train left the University Metro station, so I made my way towards the waiting South Campus shuttle bus in that sort of half-walking, half-jogging gait that people adopt when there is an automobile waiting for them, stopping only once or twice in the middle of Lee Loop to tie my shoe.
The bus driver and his passengers, who had watched my progress towards them attentively, displayed a benign patience when I boarded the vehicle. Most kept their opinion of my punctuality to a polite murmur, and a large minority of them moved their feet out of the aisle so I could make my way to the empty seat next to the garbage bag with minimal risk of injury.
After our first attempt to disembark was aborted when a pair of flailing international students galloped out of the Union and caught our driver’s attention, the lights dimmed, and we were on our way.
Normally, this trip would take me about 30 or 40 minutes from start to finish from North Campus to Delaware Park. Fortune had other plans: I was on UB’s new “Stampede Express” bus service, part of a larger UB 2020 initiative to streamline the university’s mass transit system. The plan covers everything from intra-building shuttles to a monorail that connects the various quads of the Ellicott complex.
“We’ve had to take a long, hard look at how much UB students want to walk,” said Dennis Black, vice president for student affairs. “Their answer is clear: ‘not at all.’”
Student leaders have both lauded and taken credit for the plan, depending on who was in the room at the time. Some students have complained that the program still doesn’t do enough to remove physical activity from their daily lives.
“I mean, it doesn’t go everywhere,” said Tony La Broglioni, a sophomore finance major who lives in Wilkeson Quad. “Like, how’m-I-gonna-get to Hubies?”
The only thing I knew on my first trip on the Stampede Express was that I was in for one hell of a ride.
Our first stop was the Ellicott tunnel. I had been on the bus for maybe twenty minutes by now. To be honest, I’d lost count, too engrossed in the conversation occurring next to me. A nervous-looking young man in tight jeans and a t-shirt advertising something called Fall Out Boy was engaging in mild courtship with a brunette female next to him.
“I dunno, I’m into everything, y’know,” he said. “Rock, punk rock, indie rock, classic rock…”
“Huh?” The girl pulled a white ear-piece out of her left ear.
“I said—“ he began again.
“Oh, yeah, I’m into everything to everything, too,” she said, oblivious. “Everything but country that is.” At this, the young man erupted into spasms of racked laugher, glancing furtively towards his companion every couple of seconds to make sure she understood how funny he found her to be.
“Yeah, it’s like, I like rap, like at a party or the club or something’, but I just can’t get into it,” he said. “Like, I guess I just don’t relate to, like, gangs and shooting people and stuff.”
“Huh?”
“I SAID I JUST CAN’T—“
“Yeah, I don’t get black culture either.”
They continued on like this for the next few minutes or so in a fashion that made me pine for the ignorance of the English language granted to foreign students (though I’m told we’ll be civilizing them next year). After the bus driver finished his cigarette, we lumbered on—right back to Lee Loop. I asked the driver if I was on the wrong bus.
“No, this is the new route,” he said. “We go to Ellicott, then back to Lee—in case anyone’s changed their minds—then it’s back to Ellicott again. I’ll probably smoke another cigarette there, and then I haven’t decided, but I was kind of leaning towards bringing a kid or two from NSC to Hadley or just generally sitting around and idling for awhile.”
Most of my fellow riders seemed pleased with the service. When we finally pulled out of campus an hour later, there was noticeable applause and colorful exclamation, though some, conscious of the engine noise, resorted to sign language.
President John Simpson created the UB 2020 initiative upon his being named captain of the flagship of the SUNY system because he believed the school was desperately in need of catchy, futuristic jargon.
“Basically, I knew everyone was going to tear me apart from Day One for the scandal surrounding that $3 million loan my parents gave me at U of W and my total ignorance of the issues facing Western New York students,” Simpson said over lunch. “So, you create this idea of a university-wide ‘conversation’ about ‘diversifying’ our ‘strengths.’”
“It’s total bullshit,” he said. “But they bought it.”
Student Association President Dela Yador applauded Simpson’s focus on transportation, noting with pride that his student body’s lack of a sense of perspective made them an easy sell.
“Parking, buses, TAs with accents—it’s all we really care about,” he said, though he added that students also care an awful lot about cell phones and iPods. “We’re vacuous materialists; it’s great.”
“Just look at the popularity of those Internet lists referring to all the ways in which we’re ‘products of the ‘90s.’ Those things read like a marketing project,” said Yador. “One of the key strengths of this generation of college students is our ability to see ourselves as an Abercrombie & Fitch ad, demand marginal adjustments in quality of life when we enter the political process, then actively forget about the whole thing when it’s over like it was a bad dream. Wanna get wasted?”
University officials say the Stampede Express is more efficient than just driving back and forth between the Spine and the dorms because it provides an opportunity to drop each student off individually at whatever campus location they choose.
“It’s about providing the students with choices,” said VP Black. “Do they want to go to Ellicott or Governors? Do they want to get fresh air and exercise or do they want to take it easy and play it off like they’ve got glandular problems? Maybe they just want to ride around on the bus all day.”
“I don’t know what the students want,” he said. “I just sort of work here.”
Plans are also in the works for a system of golf cart taxis that would ferry students to and fro throughout individual buildings. The idea has been met with enthusiasm.
“Of course I don’t want to have to walk from one end of Baldy to the other,” said Tara Kczlwczklwxczski, freshman accounting major. “I’m fat.”
The plan also calls for a monorail network that would connect each of the quads in Ellicott to one another via high-speed train. Some honors students have criticized the administration for leaving out Governors Hall.
“I think my record speaks for itself when it comes to the needs of UB’s best and brightest,” said Black. “Fuck ‘em.”
When the Stampede Express finally reached South Campus, the scene was grim. There were bodies everywhere, some huddled together in a last ditch attempt to share warmth, others frozen to lightposts like ghastly rejects from the auditions for A Christmas Story. What survivors remained had become monstrous husks of humanity. Two pale rugby players crouched behind a bush, their faces wild and flecked with blood and spittle, as they ravaged the corpse of a portly janitor they had strangled for lack of any other sustenance. A third survived only by crawling inside the abdomen of a commuter he had slain for the purpose.
The weary passengers stepped off the bus in silent reverence of the unfortunate travelers’ plight, with the exception of an occasional “Huh?” that bubbled out of my happy couple’s hushed conversation. Everyone went their separate ways. The bus driver lit a cigarette and began to hack shallow graves out of the frozen earth.
I helped the near-frozen rugby players get on the idling bus.
“We didn’t think you would come,” one said through his tears. “Honest, we thought we’d have to walk for sure. And it was so cold, it was so very cold.”
“They’ll hang us for sure,” said another. “Well, figuratively. How many community service hours do you think they give for a thing like this?”
I didn’t have an answer. I had missed my train. But whether the Stampede Express had failed me or I had failed it remained unclear.
Would I be willing to do my part to make the system work? Could I summon the strength to wait on South Campus and quietly eat people so that Ellicott students could avoid wearing winter coats? How much of myself was I willing to give?
Uncertain of my place, I said my goodbyes to the bus and its guilt-ridden cargo, tightened my belt, turned my collar to the wind, and called a cab.
