There are a large number of students from Vermont and I think it would be worth while to have holiday, beginning, and end of school year bus service to Burlington, VT. While Burlington is not a large city, this bus would service between 30 and 100 Vermont students. I know of at least 25 in the Burlington area here at SLU that would take it at least twice a year. Does anyone know how many VT students we have?

Reed N Carr '10 (802)-324-1329 rncarr06@stlawu.edu CC + EAO

The Society for Conservation Biology this year for the first time is having a carbon offset for air travel to the meetings to work towards carbon neutral transport of individuals to the annual meeting. It would be nice if we thought about a policy where in addition to airfare, carbon offsets were perhaps included in the amount of money the U would spend for travel.

Is there any decent evaluation of the different organizations providing carbon offsets?

One thing I've been thinking about: SLU students and employees are doing a lot of air travel to attend conferences and other meetings, do research, study abroad, etc. This is part of our carbon footprint too. Can we find ways of bringing this "global transportation" into the conversation about environmental responsibility?

1. some of my comments for Energy are more relevant here (sorry)

2. the first Opp in the list...how much CO2 would this also save??

3. I would love to take a bus/van to work on days I can't bike

4. like the student ride board, could a fac/staff riseshare info center be established so we can network and arrange car pooling

I'm not totally comfortable with this section. The rideboard, encouraging walking, and carpooling is great. But because of where we are and where I live, taking any kind of public transportation to get here is out of the question. I don't like the idea of raising parking prices, the mindset of needing to drive from the suites to the gym is the problem.

as for the fleet, there are currently no more efficient ways to transport large numbers of people for an off-campus lab than those vans. Eliminating the vans means changing science curriculums and thereby eliminating a serious draw to these programs. The better approach is to adjust the utility and small transport end of the fleet. Facilities guys do not need to move things around campus in retired 15 pass. vans. The gators are a slight improvement. Onondaga County's parks department uses GEM electric cars (they make a utility model with a bed, I think) for minor jobs and pickups for when they're needed. Then, replace the chevy venture sector of the fleet with the toyota prius. These minivans are often used for only a few passengers to go to conferences, cars would certainly suffice.

One suggestion could be to gradually alter the St. Lawrence vehicles to become more eco-friendly. I.e they could run on bio-diesel or other energy sources.I have read artciles about cars that can run on vegetable and french-fry oil. Maybe the Food and Dining services can be recruited to donate the oil they use to make our food.

What about some details on the success of green bikes? How many get checked out? By whom? For how long? Are there very often people who want a bike but can't check one out? should we be expanding this program?

Some data colletion on where people go, and then some effort to get them there efficiently, might be useful. For instance, do students ever travel from Canton to Potsdam? Do SLU students use the Clarkson or Potsdam State Libraries? Or just want to go out for dinner? Perhaps there could be a van that took students, dropped them for a particular time frame, and then picked them up again. This would reduce the number of students dirivng individual cars.

It would be neat if we could make people aware of local "footprints" - those footprint calculators could be useful more locally, so folks could see the effects of e.g. walking instead of driving to work.

Do students pay to bring cars to campus? Do students pay for parking permits? I believe it is still the case at some schools that first-year (and sometimes older) students are simply not allowed to have cars on campus....Given how remote we are, I'm not necessarily advocating this, but it does bring me pause....

As much as I like ideas such as ride boards, etc. we need also to think of incentives that help change culture so people don't want to drive.

A modest commuter bus service presently exists within the county. Promoting the service on campus should be carried out. Increasing fees for parking could be a way of encouraging more individuals to walk to the campus. Examining the possiblity of an on site bio-diesel production faciltity should be undertaken.