The Student Ride Board is pretty easy to find-located in the "Quick Find" drop-down menu on the college webpage, right in between "Request info" and "Safety"-and yet, it seems as if many students are unaware of its existence.
The board is exactly what its name promises, a place where you can request rides or find passengers to ride with you.
If you don't have a car and none of your friends have a car, and if it's not a day when the shuttle busses are scheduled (that is, all days except the weekend and Friday night) and you can't afford to take a cab, it can be pretty damn hard to get out of Chestertown.
This is where the Student Ride Board comes in. You can log into the board with your student user name and password, and then enter Starting Point (although this seems a bit unnecessary), Destination, Departure date and your contact info. Then if you're lucky, someone will respond to your request and give you a ride. These rides can be completely free, although the common-and polite-thing to do is to at least offer to split the gas money.
The board can also be used the other way around. If you're going to a big city or airport, or really, just anywhere that isn't Chestertown, Maryland, why not take passengers with you? Not only will you be doing someone a huge favor, you will also have company for the ride AND save some money on gas. It's win/win, really.
Everybody seems a bit uncertain as to who exactly is in charge of the board. The reason for this, apparently, is because there isn't anybody.
Ted Knab, who created the board interface, told me that so far, the board has not had a moderator, which is abundantly clear just from a single glance at the site, which shows ride requests dating back to Thanksgiving.
There is an obvious imbalance between the number of ride requests and people willing to take on passengers. Many of the ride requests are from international students who are much more dependant on the school shuttle than most of the American students.
Emma Looney tried to use the board last semester, and even though her request should have been very easy to fill (a ride to any major city at Thanksgiving) and even thought she put her request in a good three or four weeks prior to the departure date, her request was unsuccessful, and she thinks the board should be better advertised.
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