If you go to college in a small town, getting to campus without a car can be a pain.
There might be plenty of ways to get from New York City to Rochester, Syracuse, or Binghamton. But if your campus is another 30 or 40 miles away, you still have to figure out that last part of the trip.
We were seeing this with students at SUNY Brockport. A lot of students were already taking OurBus between New York City and Rochester, then finding their own way between Rochester and campus.
We figured we could make that easier.
OurBus now offers trips connecting New York City with SUNY Brockport, Colgate University, SUNY Oswego, and SUNY Morrisville. You take an OurBus to the nearest city, and we arrange a local taxi to take you the rest of the way.
For Brockport, the connection is in Rochester. For SUNY Oswego, it’s Syracuse. And for Colgate and SUNY Morrisville, it’s Binghamton.
The taxi is booked ahead of time, so you don’t have to get off the bus and start searching for a ride. If the bus is running late, our team works with the taxi company on the connection.
That’s particularly helpful if you’re a student traveling alone, and hopefully one less thing for parents to worry about, too.
What about school breaks?
When everyone is heading home at once, the setup is a little different.
During busy periods like Thanksgiving, winter break, and spring break, we continue to run direct buses from select campuses when there are enough students traveling.
The bus + taxi option is really for all those other trips during the school year: a weekend at home, heading back to campus after a visit, or having family come up for the weekend.
It lets us offer another way to reach smaller college towns even when there aren’t enough people traveling on a particular day to fill a whole bus.
You may have seen us in the news
We’re not the only ones talking about it.
The Democrat & Chronicle recently covered the Brockport connection and spoke with OurBus co-founder Axel Hellman about why students were already using our Rochester route to get to and from school.
Read: OurBus launches Brockport-to-NYC travel option
And earlier this year, The Colgate Maroon wrote about the new option for students traveling between New York City and Colgate’s campus in Hamilton.
Read: OurBus Introduces Travel Package from New York City to Hamilton
We’ve been serving college communities in upstate New York since we started running to Ithaca and Binghamton in 2017. Over the years, students have been pretty good at showing us where it makes sense to go next.
Brockport, Hamilton, Oswego, and Morrisville are some of the latest.
If you’re planning a trip home, or a parent figuring out how to get your student back to campus, you can search available trips at ourbus.com or in the OurBus app.
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