Safe Rides not reaching some students

By Vasanth Sridharan

Late at night after the buses have stopped running to her apartment, Tanisha King has no way of getting home. Her apartment is too far and too dangerous to walk to by herself, and taxis are expensive. But King does not live in a remote apartment complex isolated from University life. In fact, the North Lincoln Avenue area that she lives at houses over 1,000 University students.

“I want to get Safe Rides out to North Lincoln,” King said.

King, a junior in LAS, lives in the University Commons apartments at 1321 N. Lincoln Ave in Urbana, well outside of the boundaries of Safe Rides, a service run by Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District (CUMTD). Safe Rides exists to transport students to their homes safely late at night, but King and many of the other students who live outside the boundaries said they are being neglected by the program.

University Commons is just one of the University student-dominated apartment complexes outside of the boundaries of Safe Rides. The late night transportation program operates in the area from Windsor Avenue on the South, Vine Street on the East, University Avenue and Church Street from Goodwin Avenue to Fourth Street on the North and State Street on the West.

There are two other apartment complexes north of University Avenue on Lincoln Avenue, in addition to University Commons: Atrium Apartments at 1306 N. Lincoln Avenue and College Park Connections at 1601 N. Lincoln Avenue. Over 1,000 University students live in these three complexes, said Angie Jackson, the property director for College Park Connections.

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The North Lincoln area is not the only off campus housing area that Safe Rides does not serve. Mike Stubbe, the operations planner for CUMTD, said the Sunnycrest Apartments in Urbana, Sterling Fields in Champaign and others are concerned about their service. However Esther Patt, the coordinator of the University Tenant Union, said the North Lincoln area has the highest number of students in a concentrated area outside of the Safe Rides boundaries.

The area between University Avenue and the North Lincoln apartments is also seen as unsafe by some of the students who live there. According to statistics provided by the Urbana Police Department (UPD), 30 instances of assault, robbery and battery occurred this school year in that stretch of Urbana.

Another reason that many of the students in the North Lincoln area want to see an expansion of CUMTD service is to curb drunken driving in the area. Coretta Richardson, a senior in LAS, said she sees people driving back from the bars drunk all the time. According to statistics provided by UPD, police arrested people 13 times for drunken driving in that stretch of Urbana this year.

Safe Rides was started in the 1980s by University organizations in order to transport women safely at night, Stubbe said. In 1996, after a murder on campus, the Dean of Students Office asked CUMTD to take over the program. CUMTD continued using the same boundaries, and there has only been one change: service was extended north from University Avenue to Church Street for six blocks.

Stubbe said the benefits of a further expansion of the bus service or of Safe Rides has to be weighed against the cost of raising fees for the whole student body. If Safe Rides is expanded, it could mean the introduction of a new van which would cost CUMTD $54.10 per hour for the whole night, Stubbe said.

“The more boundaries you expand, the higher the cost becomes,” Stubbe said. “The focus (of Safe Rides) was main campus area and the immediate areas around campus where students are living.”

There is a regular CUMTD bus route that runs out to the apartment complexes on North Lincoln. The 13 Silver (130 Silver during the evenings) runs every half an hour until around midnight on weekdays and Saturdays, and until 6 p.m. on Sundays.

Mallory Morris, a junior in education, works at the Lincoln Avenue Residence Halls (LAR) and some nights she does not get out of work before midnight.

“Last semester, when I didn’t have my car, I would have to take the bus early in the day and stay with my sister for the night,” Morris said. “If I didn’t have my sister, I probably would have ended up sleeping in the lounge.”

Pam Voitik, the director of Campus Services and former member of the Campus Transportation Committee, said the referendum that passed this year by the committee did not make any changes to the Silver routes or to Safe Rides because other bus routes were extended a lot on the last referendum.

The committee also had to make an inflationary increase to the student CUMTD fee. Student referendums are passed every three years and are negotiated between the Campus Transportation Committee and CUMTD. Voitik said she is satisfied with the way the system is right now.

“When you look at public transportation, it’s to serve the majority,” Voitik said. “We have so much coverage now, I am not sure that we need more.”

Currently, every University student pays $33 per semester. This gives them access to all CUMTD routes on campus and in the community. Next year, the fee will rise to $38 per semester. Stubbe said he has to weigh an expansion of any service with the number of students who will benefit from it.

“If you’ve got 36,000 students that are paying the fee and a thousand students are going to benefit as a result of a fee increase, do the other students want to pay extra so (the thousand students) can get to a location that they need to go?” Stubbe asked.

Until the next referendum, King will keep working on trying to convince CUMTD that the students who live in the North Lincoln area need an expansion of the service options. Her anger with the lack of service triggered her to start a petition, which she hopes to send to CUMTD by the beginning of June. She wants to convince CUMTD of the need the students in the North Lincoln area have for Safe Rides and for expanded bus service.

“We were all frustrated and angry about it, but no one had the time to commit to the petition,” King said. “I hope to get Safe Rides out to North Lincoln as well as getting the 13 (bus route) to run later at nights.”