The promise of expanded shuttle service is not enough for professors on the serveral committees exploring Allston’s possibilities for everything from museums to science.

“As faculty on these committees, we were asked to think openly about Allston,” says Professor Professor of Chemistry Eric N. Jacobsen. “And when you ask a lot of professors to think openly about something, you inevitably get some pretty wild ideas.”

Winthrop House Master and Divinity School professor Paul D. Hanson, who is on the Advisory Group on Physical Planning for Graduate Schools, likes the thought of one day riding a monorail into an Allston campus.

“With a monorail, you could whip across the Charles without having to stop at any lights,” he says.

Others have considered the idea of students using hi-tech Segway scooters to zip cross the river—a notion already explored by University President Lawrence H. Summers.

“The president and one of the deans have ridden on them and thought they were kind of neat,” Zeckhauser says.

Another speedy alternative to walking is a moving sidewalk, like the kind found in airports, which would run from JFK St. to North Harvard St. across the Anderson Bridge.

“They’re expensive,” says Spiegelman of the machines known as people-movers, “but they’re certainly a possibility.”

People-movers are one option discussed by planners from a University-hired transportation firm called Arup, according to Dennis F. Thompson, the senior advisor to the president who heads the Allston planning committee.

Another plus for the moving sidewalks: planners say that, unlike waiting for a ride on a bus or a train, climbing onto a moving sidewalk could help people feel in control of their movement.

“The trouble with monorails and subways is that you have to walk to the station and wait, and there cannot be all that many stations on the campus,” Thompson says.

Thompson’s committee expects to hear final recommendations from Arup this May—and though the consultants have kept their proposals under wraps, veteran planner from the design school Alex Krieger expects them to come up with two proposals, one band-aid solution for the short term, and another larger project for the long term.

Overarching Solutions

Last year, Krieger led a seminar of 13 students on campus planning for Allston, the second design school class which dealt explicitly with Harvard’s plans for a new campus.

In a proposal that has made the rounds of Harvard’s senior administration, one of Krieger’s students proposed a radically Old World approach to the problem of connecting Cambridge and Allston.