One of the most annoying parts of my every morning sophomore year was making the trek from Harris Hall all the way up to Academic West. I thought that was tough, but students living downtown and in the Mods have it even worse. While some students are lucky enough to have a car on campus, others need to get a little creative.
There is nothing in this world that can put a smile on my face on a Monday morning like the sight of two lacrosse players zooming across Route 15 on a single-seat moped. Two six-foot-five men weighing in at over 200 pounds, each huddled up close to each other, trying with all their power not to tip over in the middle of a highway – I guess that’s one way to go about initiating some team bonding.
Fraternity brothers have implemented their own personal method of transportation: all potential new members of Sigma Gamma Beta Fish are required to carry the brothers on their backs to and from all their classes for the next two weeks if they want to receive a bid. “If you crack under the weight of a brother, you’d crack under the weight of the Brotherhood, and we cannot have that in this year’s pledge class,” claims the pledge master (with his thousand-yard stare). I can’t think of a better example of survival of the fittest in 2021. Rumor has it a Potential New Member snapped their spinal cord in half and had to be life-flighted to Pittsburgh. Apparently, not everyone is built for the brotherhood.
Another commonly utilized form of transportation up The Hill is the infamous Bucknell shuttle. Let me tell you: that thing can move. All basic rules of traffic disappear when it comes to that shuttle. The other day it picked a student up directly in front of Bertrand, caught air driving off the top of Freas Hall, flew down the hill to pick a student up at Hunt, and still managed to drop everyone off at Holmes in precisely 0.37 seconds — an average speed for a Tuesday morning. The transmission on that beast must have been handcrafted by the heroic engineers in Dana themselves. We tried to have a conversation with the driver of the shuttle, but it seemed as though the reality was “compromised” (if you’re picking up when I’m putting down) for him at the moment, which explains quite a bit. While this does cause a little bit of damage to the campus, it is by far the safest, fastest, and most efficient method of transportation explored thus far.