Every week, student newspapers nationwide publish a rash of reports about scary situations and worst-case scenarios that undergraduates endure before and after spirited bouts of socializing off campus.

Students’ trips to and from their residence halls in the late evening or early morning hours to bars, clubs, diners, and house parties seem to be regularly ripe for related crime, accidents, and poor decisions.

Among the most common: DUI arrests; car crashes; being stranded due to lost wallets, purses, IDs or nasty weather; long walks through bad parts of town; unnerving waits for taxis; accepting rides with strangers; and far worse — robberies, assaults, stabbings, and shootings.

What might be the solution to some or all of these negative outcomes and bad judgment calls?  At Northern Illinois University, it is the Late Night Ride Service, or LNRS.

According to a report in The Northern Star, NIU’s student newspaper, the LNRS is built atop a come-one-come-all foundation.  The aim is to compel students to phone the service before wrongly deciding to do something like drive drunk and to know it is available as back up if a night goes wrong.

As staff writer Kyla Gardner notes, the five vans in the LNRS fleet “will take anyone anywhere, no questions asked, free of charge.  A caller only needs to provide their name, location and desired destination, number of riders and a phone number when requesting a ride from the service.”

Apparently, the LNRS is quite popular.  Gardner writes that last spring, depending on the time of night, up to 200 calls came in every half hour.  One related issue is wait-time, with one NIU student who regularly rides confirming she usually has to wait an hour for a van to arrive.  A shuttle representative counters that vans typically show up less than 15 minutes after a call, with many delays stemming from riders including their poor cell service and confusion over the exact pick-up spot.

While rare, the most interesting pick-ups involve law enforcement.  As the Northern Star reports, “If a student is arrested in a residence hall, the Late Night Ride Service may give them a ride home from the NIU Police Station. . . . The LNRS may also pick up a student from the residence hall if they can bring bond money for a friend.”

In the end, along with trips to and from bars and restaurants, students most often take advantage of the service to shop.  The top three business locations requested as drop-off or pick-up points, in order: Wal-Mart, Target, and Walgreen’s.

In these cases, the service is used not for safety but simple convenience.  As an NIU student told Gardner, “It’s annoying taking groceries on the bus.”

What do you think?  What are the transportation options for students at your school?  How effective and convenient are they?  And what off-campus spots do students most often want to go?

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