<p>Just wondering what one uses for public transportation to help you get out of the middle of nowhere and connect to rail, bus lines, or aircraft for a trip home.</p>
<p>The colgate.edu site, section About Colgate, shows the offerings of the campus travel agency such as Demand Response Shuttle to Syracuse airport, the Amtrak train station in Utica (NYC and Boston service) and buses leaving campus 3 times/day to NYC.
Many students have cars and car pool with their friends.</p>
<p>How about returning to campus using rail, buslines, or the airport. How easy is it to arrange transportation?</p>
<p>It sure would be easier if we weren’t being asked a hypothetical about “all” transit to and from Hamilton, New York from everywhere. Most students either bring cars to campus (perfectly acceptable) or take a campus shuttle up to Syracuse airport to catch a flight somewhere else. My daughter is from Los Angeles, and does exactly that – the shuttle to the airport, not the car on campus. They you fly to a connecting airport (Philadelphia, Chicago, etc.) to switch planes to wherever you are going. Not easy, but not so bad. </p>
<p>If we lived on Long Island in Boston or somewhere, we would have gotten her a reliable old car to drive to school. I don’t know if anyone uses the train, but perhaps some people do. Problem is, trains are slow and it takes an hour to get to Syracuse or Utica and then you have to wait . . . . This is the same problem students have at Cornell, Middlebury, you name it. My nephew attends Bates, and their shuttle takes THREE hours down to Boston to catch a plane. Mind boggling. So, as “out in the middle of nowhere” Colgate seems, it could be a lot worse. </p>
<p>When I attended Colgate back in the Pleistocene Era, I drove up from the New York suburbs which took almost five boring hours (4 1/2 with secret back routes known only to a few but look out for stray cows). They haven’t installed a high speed Maglev train direct to Hamilton yet. If they ever do develop a freeway or high speed train that can get you between Hamilton and NYC in a couple of hours, expect applications to Colgate to skyrocket.</p>
<p>What’s this about Colgate being in the “middle of nowhere”?</p>
<p>Hamilton, NY is located very near the geographic center of NY state. Roughly 37,000 current students and alumni have made the trek successfully and I don’t recall too many moaning about it- apart from those tall tale anecdotes about the 30 feet of snow that happened to fall on the last day of December exam week.</p>
<p>In any event, Newport28, Colgate is your destination at the center of NY state for a terrific college experience. I am assuming you are from California… Doesn’t looking at the question positively make the prospect of arriving at Syracuse airport and getting a ride for an hour to its southeast more pleasant?</p>
<p>Best of luck with your college plans!</p>