Digger Drive: A Safe Ride Home, Orediggers Helping Orediggers

Undergraduate Student Goverment (USG) has been making great strides towards implementing the Digger Drive program. This program is focused on ensuring that all Mines students have access to a safe ride home over the weekends.

This program has been in development by the Safe Ride Committee. This committee is comprised of fourteen members of USG.

Due to their persitence and efforts, Digger Drive is closer than ever to being launched this St. Patrick’s Day weekend.

The committee is currently waiting for adminstration to give the green light, allowing the program to start serving the Mines community.

“The volunteers are students that are from campus because our big thing is [making sure that] Orediggers help Orediggers,” said Jon Paz, president of USG.

There will be a call center which will “batch” calls to the drivers. Batching involves locating the caller and cars containing drivers, and optimizing which cars go where.

While the person calling remains on the phone, a car will be sent to the location of the caller to safely pick them up.

The call center will provide information about the car, including the driver’s name, a description of the ar and its time of arrival.

Those responsible for driving are referred to as the “fleet team.” In each car, there will be a driver and a navigator.

The navigator will be equipped a Digger Drive phone which they will use to input the address of the pickup location.

However, due to legal concerns, it is necessary that all passengers have filled out waivers before the weekend of service. Digger Drive can only provide service to those with completed waivers.

“If you haven’t [signed a waiver], then we will not be able to provide that service, but we will make sure that there is a whole procedure and it involves asking the severity of the situation and then giving resources to get that person home,” said Paz.

The Safe Ride committee hopes to have the program up and running for St. Patrick’s Day weekend. However, the program still needs to be finalized by the legal team and approved by administration.

“I don’t know if the legal team thinks it’s reasonable, because they are the ones that have to do contracting for our rental cars, make sure that our waivers are solid; it’s really up to them,” Paz said. “From our end, from the USG end, we are ready to go.”

If this program is appoved, be sure to check the Daily Blast for information about filling out the waiver and signing up to volunteer for this great program.