When I first got here three years ago I received a bookmark that said the now-familiar, "To be at home in all lands and all ages; to count Nature a familiar acquaintance..." If you are a first year, the only land you are going to be easily acquainted with this year is the land you can ride your bike to. First-year students can no longer keep cars on campus, and the old Stanwood Street parking lot now looks like a motocross course.
I have no problem with the campus becoming "greener," and I always give the lazy kid who drives to Thorne for dinner the evil eye. Also, it has been proposed that keeping cars out of the picture will increase class cohesion by reducing the differences between students with different financial backgrounds. Now that may be true to a degree, but I think that first-year car ownership correlates far stronger with how close you live to campus than how much money you have. I knew plenty of "rich" kids who did not have a car my first year, and plenty of "poor" kids who had one. Maybe they didn't roll past the Polar Bear in a Lexus SUV, but wheels are wheels.
I had an old Ford with roll-up windows, a hole in the dashboard, busted power steering, and brakes that sound like a pissed off pterodactyl. To be fair, let's supply each first year room with a TV, so there isn't the divide between those who have a 60 inch flat screen with surround sound and those with the 15 inch CRT, and while we're at it, start ordering school uniforms. I propose the sweater vest and faux-hawk look should be made mandatory for all. And then there's the kid who paid a grand to park in someone's driveway...
For some people it is affordable and convenient to bring a car to campus; does this make those without a car feel bad? I don't know, but if I didn't have a car I'd be happy to have a friend or roommate with one so I could get a ride off campus every once in a while.
It costs about a hundred dollars each way to fly or take a train to my home in New York, and then someone needs to drive forty minutes to get me to the airport or twenty minutes to an Amtrak station. On the other hand, it costs me about twenty-five bucks in gas to get home, and usually I bring a couple people along to split the cost. For people that live nearby it's cheaper to bring a car if you already have one.
My point is that you may be able to take a taxi to Cooks Corner or Freeport, but nobody is going to take a cab to Popham Beach, Moosehead Lake, Acadia, or any other random place they want to just go and explore. The spontaneous road trip adventure is the best way to learn about where we are. I guess you could hire a taxi for the day and ask the driver to stop on the side of the road and wait for you at a cool-looking shop or lobster shack...for a couple hundred bucks (although you may make a new friend).
Zipcars are expensive, there are only three of them for hundreds of people, and you need to plan your spontaneous feelings well in advance. Pain in the butt. If a student already has a car, why pay the insurance and upkeep to let it sit in the driveway at home and then pay seven dollars an hour to drive a Zipcar, plus the annual fee? Seven dollars an hour is fine to run down to L.L Bean, but for the more migrant among us, the possibility of a weekend getaway would be gone.
College is supposed to be that learning experience where we grow into "real people," right? We need to grow, mature, and gain knowledge not only in the classroom, but in the real world. That may be tough to do while stuck inside the Bowdoin bubble. I came to Bowdoin partly because our location is unique among its peers. In short: Maine is cool, why do anything that may even slightly inhibit students' ability to explore the world around them in a non-structured and personal way?
I'm sure it's true that the College is short on parking spaces and there are logical, logistical reasons for the decision to ban first-year cars, so maybe it would be better to call a spade a spade and present that, along with the environmental factor, as the reason. I think the greener thing to do would be to ban students from driving from their dorm to Thorne, not ban them from driving home or to the beach.
Maybe I'm being overly crotchety, which is undeniably part of my personality, but I'm a big fan of personal freedom. In this bizarre college pseudo-world bubble, I needed, and still need, the ability to get far away from campus for an afternoon, and I imagine that I'm not alone.
Michael Rothschild is a member of the Class of 2010.