What’s the best/safe way for a student to get to and from Midway to UChicago?
Depends where you’re going. For buses you have the 55, 59 (doesn’t run Sundays), and 63 which run down 55th street, 59th street, and 63rd street, respectively (shocker). You can take the orange line and transfer to the green line or the red line at Roosevelt and either get off at Garfield and take the 55 bus (the 59 bus stops at Garfield Red too, though on the opposite side of the street you’d expect which confuses some people) or get off at 63rd/Cottage Grove and walk.
Fastest way and best way with luggage is uber or a taxi, naturally.
@HydeSnark Thanks!
This is a good tool (much better than Google Maps imo) for getting transit directions: https://citymapper.com/chicago?set_region=us-chicago
I’m a big fan of the transit app for ios or android: http://transitapp.com/
As for safety - be careful if you walk across Washington Park at night. The park is pretty much fine, though a bit desolate at night, but you don’t want to walk by the gas station on the corner of Garfield and King after dark by yourself. It’s poorly lit, surrounded by empty lots, and is a cheap gas station in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. All CTA routes are very safe however, get on a bus at Midway and get off in Hyde Park, Woodlawn, or Kenwood, and you will be absolutely fine. Between 63rd and 47th and between Cottage Grove and the lake it is very safe and you don’t have to be any more worried than you would be in the Loop.
Student government runs airport shuttles at the end and beginning of quarters. Cottage Grove is a street running north-south on the west side of campus, along Washington Park. Like all streets, it has more and less dangerous parts. Cottage Grove and 57th is the UChicago Hospital’s Center for Care and Discovery. Go 20 blocks south, and it’s one of many struggling black communities in the city with all the [url=<a href=“http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-man-blames-himself-for-friend-s-slaying-that-s-on-me-y-all-that-s-on-me-20160407-story.html%5Dproblems%5B/url”>http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-man-blames-himself-for-friend-s-slaying-that-s-on-me-y-all-that-s-on-me-20160407-story.html]problems[/url] that comes with that…
Keep in mind that, depending on the time of day, it takes about a half hour or less to travel by taxi / uber and close to an hour to travel by bus. My son did the latter only once and decided it was way too much of a hassle between the extra time and having to deal with luggage. If you can afford it, as HydeSnark pointed out, a taxi or uber is far more convenient.
Unless you are used to the Chicago bus system, take a cab or Uber. I frequently see European tourists on 55th Street west of 90/94, and they look very, very lost and very, very out of place.
Give me a break! It’s the easiest thing in the world to take the bus from Midway to UChicago. Yes, you have to carry your luggage, and yes, it’s slower than a cab or uber – but also a heck of a lot cheaper. In all of my years traveling to the University of Chicago campus via Midway, I have taken a cab twice, and one of those times it took 45 minutes and well over $50 to get me there. The bus has never taken as long as an hour, and when I figured out about the 59 it never took as long as 45 minutes.
The hardest thing about taking the bus from Midway is the walk from the terminal area to the bus/El area.
I have no idea how the European tourists Zinhead sees get to 55th Street west of the Dan Ryan, but it’s not because they were taking a bus from Midway to UChicago, unless they all have serious intellectual disabilities.
Taking the Orange Line downtown and then taking the Red or Green line back is a very roundabout way to go, and really doesn’t make sense unless you have no other option.
@JHS I’ve gone both ways a bunch of times and timed it. Orange/Green is like 10 minutes faster if it’s peak times and a lot of people are getting on/off the bus. A lot of people use the 55th and 63rd bus to go just a few blocks in Englewood, so sometimes you end up stopping at literally every stop.
Under 1/2 hour by car via 55th/Garfield Blvd. but in those days we were grad students and had our own transportation (my husband’s car was actually stolen from around 56th and Kimbark once but we recovered it. The hot-wiring apparently broke the steering column and set off the horn so they abandoned it in someone’s driveway at 4 am. . . with the horn going off. Many were inconvenienced that night).
Do you still have to worry about the occasional stray bullet? That always made the trek to Midway pretty exciting.
Chicago Lawn and Gage Park used to have large Lithuanian, Czech and Polish populations.
Uber pool is always a pretty cheap option and is really easy if you don’t like public transport
It is easy, but it is not terribly safe. The bus lines you mention run right through some of the most violent neighborhoods in the city. You can see for yourself in the following map which tracks shootings since 1/1/2016 in the city.
http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/shootings/
That bus ride might be safe if you are trying to make 8:00 flight out of Midway, but if your flight arrives at 8:00 PM, a bus ride across the city at night is a very different proposition.
In your zeal to promote UChicago, you rationalize away safety concerns.
We should just gentrify the rest of the South Side.
You’re right, Englewood is a pretty terrible place to live in. Half the men are incarcerated, the unemployment rate is sky-high, and nearly everyone is trapped in a terrible cycle of snowballing poverty and racism. As you pointed out, the community has a giant gun problem which, exacerbated by high unemployment, drug money, and twitter accounts, leads to a lot of unfortunate violence. I wouldn’t hang around 63rd and Racine at 3 am, it’s a rough neighborhood.
BUT (and this is a large but) you are extremely unlikely to get hurt on the CTA buses running to Hyde Park. On the bus, it’s basically as safe as it could possibly be. You’re in a well lit space with a driver with a panic button. Yes, there is gun violence, but people aren’t running around taking pot shots at the CTA. The residents of Englewood depend on the buses as much as everyone else (actually a little more, public transit is a lifesaver in poor communities).
Now, even if you do get off in the wrong neighborhood, you are still much, much safer than you might think (despite being surrounded by black people - oh the horror). You aren’t going to be staying very long, maybe an hour at most to get your bearings. Your chance of getting shot is very, very low if you’re just passing through. You aren’t going to be automatically a target. You don’t know anyone in the neighborhood who might be a target which increases your risk of being hurt. The violence is not random, the perception that the south side is filled with evil black “thugs” who go around murdering people for the heck of it is completely false. Usually, the violence stems from arguments or fights over the same stuff everyone deals with - money, friends, popularity, relationships. The difference is when you have a lot of angry people with guns and little hope for their future who feel like everyone sees them as a criminal, things get much bloodier. It is true that bystanders get hurt sometimes, but it is still staggeringly unlikely that you are going to get shot hanging around in Englewood for a few hours. If you lived there and spent all your time there, it’s a different story.
Now, it is true that you might get mugged. But you also might get mugged if you look confused in the Loop or Wrigleyville or Wicker Park. Muggers are everywhere, if you’re terrified of that you should stay out of cities entirely. But that’s still fairly unlikely.
25-30 years ago white kids who wandered a bit too far west of Cottage Grove were advised to “go back” for their own safety. (EDIT: advised by residents of the community west of Cottage Grove). This happened with some out-of-town friends of ours and it wasn’t the only example we knew about. Sure, you can get mugged in front of Buckingham fountain or Wrigleyville but the odds are lower (by a statistically significant amount).
Things might be different now - and we haven’t lived in HP for a while so I’m a bit out of touch, admittedly. We knew white kids who got mugged at the Harold’s on Stony and we knew white kids who got mugged in HP itself. Stony still held the lead by the time we left. Small data samples of course.
Mugging rates are hard to pin down since they get lumped in with other kinds of robberies (rates of getting your business robbed is higher on the south side, mostly from the poverty, but that is obvious to anyone who has ordered their Harold’s Chicken behind the bulletproof glass) - but I suspect that they aren’t significantly higher in the south side than elsewhere. Washington Park and Woodlawn have a rate of 1.0 robberies per 1000 people and 1.4 robberies per 1000 people respectively - which sounds pretty bad, except that the Loop has a rate of 1.2, coming in right between them. [And the north side is certainly not a crime free wonderland.](http://www.cwbchicago.com/)
Look, I wouldn’t advise people to wander into many of the infamous neighborhoods in the south side for no reason, especially at night. Like I said, they are rough neighborhoods, and they were much, much rougher 25 years ago at the height of the crack epidemic (or so residents on the south side tell me, I wasn’t even alive). But taking a bus to and from Midway is not going to put you in any danger.
I agree that CTA is safe. We knew plenty of kids who used it way back when and was safe then. I’m sure there have been reports of a stray bullet or two hitting a bus - but likely that’s something that makes news because it’s so sensational.
Safety on the CTA varies when and what you are riding. Other than an occasional grope or fondle for the female riders, during rush hour, the CTA is quite safe as it is filled with working commuters. During off-peak hours, it will have a mix of moms with kids, college students, and vagrants. The dangerous time is the evenings when the party-goers, drunks and druggies are about. Google “CTA violence”
What some posters are missing is the OP’s original question:
One can argue what is the best way, but I think most people would agree that a cab or Uber is safer than taking a CTA bus across Englewood, especially at night. After all, the best judge of what is safe is going to be the driver of the vehicle, not some internet based parents or former students.
Despite the crude name, the following website does a great job keeping track of the carnage in the city.