The Student Association Programming Board will be providing buses to Washington, D.C. to see the dueling rallies headed by Comedy Central’s satirical news pundits, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, on Saturday, Oct. 30.

The buses will be chartered by two SAPB committees, the Novel Events Committee (NEC) and the Off Campus College Council (OC3).

Two buses have been chartered from Shafer’s Tour and Charter, a locally-owned company from Binghamton. Each bus will carry 56 students, and a third will be chartered if demand is high enough. The buses, which are available exclusively to Binghamton University students, will take students to Stewart’s ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ and Colbert’s ‘The March to Keep Fear Alive’ rallies. Graduate students can also purchase tickets for the full price.

The buses will leave Binghamton at 5:30 a.m. on Oct. 30 to make it to the rallies’ noon start. The buses will leave Washington, D.C. at 5:30 p.m. that same day.

Tickets for the buses will go on sale on Monday, Oct. 18 and will be on sale at the SA box office until they are sold out. Tickets will cost $40 for on-campus students and $25 for off-campus students.

Seth Grossman, vice president of the NEC and a senior double-majoring in math and anthropology, said that Google Maps predicts a five-hour trip to Washington, D.C. and leaving at 5:30 a.m. allows an hour of unexpected delays.

The event has stirred excitement quickly, and 156 students have already RSVP’d to a Facebook event created by SAPB.

‘We’ve never done anything like this before,’ said Aaron Cohn, SA vice president for programming. ‘I expect that our seats will sell out real quick.’

The idea to charter the buses is a part of what Ashlee Yilmaz, the chair of the NEC and a junior majoring in industrial systems engineering, calls a ‘creative revamping’ that will give BU students more opportunities for fun and spontaneous events.

According to Yilmaz, the NEC is responsible for organizing fun, unique, spur-of-the-moment events. Members of the committee have organized various campus-wide events in the past, such as campus wars and recreational obstacle courses. The committee has been brainstorming new ways to bring more spontaneity to the campus.

The roots of this creative revamping stem from Yilmaz’s experiences as president of College-in-the-Woods’ Cayuga Hall.

‘We organized a star-gazing event in the Nature Preserve for one of the meteor showers last year,’ Yilmaz said. ‘It wound up getting a lot more attention than we expected, and we wound up bringing all five halls from CIW, about 250 people. It was really fun.’

The NEC has continued to brainstorm new events, such as a farmer’s market planned for the end of the month.

‘I want to make it so that people walking around the Brain will stop and say, ‘Hey, look at what’s going on over there,’ Yilmaz said.

Despite the fact that Stewart and Colbert tend to draw a more liberal audience, both Yilmaz and Grossman said that the SA-funded buses have received nothing but positive reactions from the SA.

Yilmaz said Stewart and Colbert ‘are just popular celebrities that students are interested in seeing.’ She said the day is not advertised as a political event.

‘It’s just supposed to be a peaceful, funny day,’ she said.

Off Campus College Transport and Escape will not be providing transportation to the Washington, D.C. rallies.

Escape would be too costly to charter as it is based out of Long Island, Yilmaz said, and OCCT buses are not allowed to leave the state.

‘We always work very closely with SAPB,’ said Giovanni Torres, director of OCCT. ‘Unfortunately, we were not able to help out on this one.’

The NEC has teamed up with OC3 to charter the buses and make it as affordable for students as possible.

The NEC has contributed money to provide all students with a ticket discount, while OC3 has contributed enough to give all off-campus students the additional $15 discount, Yilmaz said.