SafeRides is unsafe

Need for the University�s SafeRides service has outgrown the program�s original stated purpose, as more students are seeking rides when they feel unsafe and the vans cannot keep up with demand. Duke needs a transportation service that is entirely dedicated to ensuring students� safety.

Take the bus.” That’s the response that students—be they drunken freshmen on West Campus or lone female undergrads in a dim nook of Central—get all-too-often on the other end of a call to 684-SAFE. SafeRides, the supplemental van service meant to work in tandem with campus buses, has been stretched thin for far too long now, and students on Duke’s sprawling campus are justly complaining at nearly every turned down pick-up request.

Yet the real problem with SafeRides may not be in its operation, but in its foundations. The program has existed as merely a supplemental service for campus buses that often take a while to arrive and don’t run all night. With the way the Duke campus is laid out and the way reports of muggings and sexual assaults continue to pop up, someone needs to put some money into creating a transportation system exclusively for safety purposes.

The concurrence of the recent rise in student complaints about SafeRides and the merger between the transit systems of the Medical Center and the University last year is no coincidence. Picking up employees from work is a wholly different practice from stopping to make sure a woman isn’t walking backing to her dorm room halfway across campus alone. Officials say their drivers are not trained safety professionals and are not instructed to travel off-campus except when under contract with the Medical Center. But those officials should consider that in a safety-oriented service, drivers might have the extra training and ability to travel where students need to go.

With hordes of commuting Medical Center employees and lonely, rideless students jamming phone lines with around 300 calls a night, the SafeRides service is understandably taking on a hefty load. But especially given growing safety concerns stemming from several reports of on-campus crimes in the past year, it’s about time SafeRides expanded its forces.

Transportation officials frustrated with having to send out their own supervisors to drive a fourth van on especially busy nights are working within a budget that has undergone little to no change since the inception of SafeRides about 10 years ago. It is imperative and practical, then, that SafeRides receive the necessary funding to purchase new vans and increase its driving and dispatch staff. It would not be asking too much for students to pay an extra required fee to improve the service; campus safety has become too much of a priority at Duke for anyone to complain about that.

Until the University can separate and/or expand SafeRides, the service needs to make good on the improvements that were conceived this summer. Cutting down on response time, encouraging dispatchers to be more polite and extending bus service to 4 a.m. Thursday nights are all obvious but important suggestions that need immediate execution. But for a transportation service that is does not meet current safety needs, there are more deep-seated things to consider.