@Zinhead , you are free to do whatever you want when you are at Midway. When I, or my wife, or one of our children are at Midway, and want to go to the University of Chicago – something that has happened pretty regularly over the past decade – we take the CTA bus. We think it has the best balance of fast, safe, and cheap, i.e., it’s the most efficient way to get from point A to point B. It may only be 90% as safe as a cab, but both are in the range of 99% safe to begin with, so the difference doesn’t mean anything, and it comes at a high price.
I do like the University of Chicago, and I do promote it, but I don’t ignore things that I think are legitimate issues. Danger on the CTA does not make it to a legitimate issue for me.
I know lots of people who live in Chicagoland and never go near Hyde Park, who are certain that it is a dangerous place, or maybe a dangerous place once you are a block or two off campus. They are wrong. Similarly, if you don’t regularly take the bus on 55th/Garfield, you have no idea what a basically pleasant experience it is. Yes, you see some challenged areas (and you also get to appreciate the somewhat different characters of Black and Hispanic ghettos in Chicago). But no one shoots at you.
@JHS - A few weeks ago, I had an early appointment at Jackson Park Hospital, about two miles south of the UC campus on Stony Island. That morning there had been a drive-by shooting, and the entrance to the hospital parking lot was closed off. The victims had been removed, but their car was still there. It had numerous bullet holes, and the inside was covered with blood.
When I asked my contact how he liked working there, his response was that it was OK during the day, but at night it was a war zone, and that if you stood outside, you would hear gunshots in the distance.
It is good that you find the 55th Street bus a pleasant experience, and have not had any problems on it. However, I am not going to trust my kid’s safety to the opinions of a condescending fly-in parent when I have a lot more experience working and living in the area than they do.
And if you go 5 blocks north of the Jackson Park Hospital it’s a very safe neighborhood…north and south of 71st is night and day. Go 2 miles further south into South Chicago and it’s also much safer.
I’m not entirely sure what your point is, it isn’t news that Chicago has very poor and violent neighborhoods. But your uber is more likely to crash on the Lake Shore Drive avoiding those neighborhoods than you are to get shot riding a bus through them.
My point is that JHS consistently dismisses safety concerns because “nothing ever happened to me or my kids”. Is the CTA bus along 55th Street safe? Probably. However:
It is significantly less safe if it is the OP’s first public bus ride.
It is significantly less safe if the OP is alone.
It is significantly less safe if the OP is traveling with luggage that identifies him or her as a tourist.
It is significantly less safe if the OP is traveling in the evening after rush hour.
It is significantly less if the OP is traveling on a Friday or Saturday night.
We don’t know the OP’s situation, and to blithely provide advice to the OP to take the CTA without reservations is terrible advice.
@Zinhead , there are many posts in which I have reported that one of my kids had his pocket picked at the Garfield Red Line station, and many, many in which I have described that station as a pretty good representation of Hell on Earth (although not so much because of danger or pain as for its sheer bleakness, exposure to wind/cold, and ugliness). I tell people all the time they should take the 6 bus rather than the El/55 to travel between Hyde Park and the Loop because it feels more pleasant. And I have never, ever, told anyone that safety was not a significant concern if you wanted to take a stroll around Jackson Park Hospital, or, for that matter Englewood. I wouldn’t do that. But riding the bus isn’t the same thing.
Friday and Saturday nights, after rush hour (and quite late into the night) I think you will find the 55 bus between Hyde Park and the Garfield station jammed with University of Chicago students. I’m sure there are some students who don’t feel comfortable on that bus, but it’s part of the daily lives of many, many students. And, yes, it’s only personal anecdote, but practically every time I have taken any bus between Midway and the University of Chicago I have been (a) alone, and (b) carrying luggage identifying myself as a tourist. A couple times I was with my wife, and we were both carrying luggage. Trust me, our tough looks are not scaring off anyone out to victimize white tourists.
I can’t claim to have personal experience of taking a first public bus ride on it; my first solo public bus ride occurred when I was six years old. But I think it seems super-friendly to inexperienced users. The maps and stop announcements are extremely clear, the drivers helpful, and you can easily get a phone app that tell you in real time exactly where are all the buses or trains on any route you choose, and when the next few will come to your stop.
I will continue to “blithely” recommend taking the CTA. It’s an excellent system, including through bad neighborhoods; I wish the one where I live were that good. I honestly can’t understand why, apart from sheer discomfort about contact with people of color and not of high income, anyone should have reservations about it. “Safety” isn’t an issue.
I have no information on the current situation. However, in the sixties, before the advent of significant U. of C. policing, and at a time when Woodlawn began in earnest south of B-J and the other university buildings on 60th, I experienced several incidents which I would not have experienced in a safe neighborhood. I was living in an apartment on Dorchester nearly a full block south of 60th. In a previous post I have described those incidents. Several of them had as their common denominator that I was perceived by the black kids of my age living around me as a privileged white kid. These incidents were not byproducts of black on black violence.
I expect a similar dynamic would be at work today, whether living in, transitting or visiting neighborhoods where white kids or any white people at all do not customarily live or visit. One’s presence will be perceived by some in those neighborhoods as an invasion and will be a source of resentment. I was told once in a kindly way on a Saturday night by an elderly black resident to get off the streets for my own good. A student going into such a neighborhood is to one degree or another an interloper. This normally does not lead to anything unpleasant, but on occasion it does, as it certainly did for me. That seems to me a natural if lamentable consequence of the terrible divide in opportunity and experience that exists between these residents and the students and other people of the University. The consequence of recognizing this resentment and danger, if you believe it exists, need not be that you never leave the University precincts. I did not move out of that apartment on the edge of Woodlawn nor did I cease to walk on occasion through Woodlawn. Indeed, perhaps in part out of bravado, I customarily caught the El on 63rd to go into town in those days, whereas most U. of C. students avoided the El and no one took buses. The Illinois Central commuter train was then the standard of perfection as regards safety.
Some of my uneasiness was no doubt in my own mind. However, that unease, some of which was certainly justified, was also beneficial - it made me want to confront and try to understand, as best I could as a white student, some of what life must be like in a black neighborhood. I don’t regret that experience at all. I would encourage today’s students and their parents not to insulate themselves too thoroughly from whatever version exists around today’s campus.
@Zinhead ,while I understand it annoys you that I am speaking primarily from personal and non-systematic second-hand experience, it annoys the heck out of me that you are spouting off about this when it is completely clear that you have never ridden the bus in question or spoken about it with anyone who has, and have no idea what the actual thing is like. I don’t think you are being elitist.
@marlowe1 , I don’t doubt your experience at all. I do think to some extent it’s a relic of the high water mark of what was effectively a Black separatist ideology in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I don’t hear stories like that so much anymore. Also, I never have been, or heard anyone else talk about being, challenged as a racial interloper for riding public transportation through a minority neighborhood without getting off. My impression is that people (young men) who might be very concerned with “turf” issues for pedestrians, or bicyclists or drivers off major thoroughfares, don’t care much about seeing different people on the bus or the El through their neighborhood.
I have no personal experience of the 63rd St. Green Line El station, but for years UChicago students on CC who live in BJ (or more recently in South Campus) have consistently said that they take the Green Line there and it’s no big deal. My kid, whose office is south of the Midway, uses the 63rd St. Green Line station if he doesn’t bike to work, but I have never thought to ask him about it.
JHS I think your posts are extraordinarily well written, well thought out, and relevant to applicants and interested parties (parents like me). I’ve not seen better on any CC board. My need for CC is fading, but I hope you will keep writing these incredibly well thought out posts for the benefit of new applicants and parents, and as long as you feel your knowledge is relevant.
Are you having withdrawal symptoms, or are you glad? or do you still visit and read for entertainment and pleasure? I am wondering how I will feel when I reach that important milestone!!
CollegeAngst – Haha I figured that as with most things there is an arc. My student is a rising 4th year so I am more at the end of the arc than at the beginning. It seems to have gone very, very fast. I am happy for my son, but I am already thinking about how I will miss our visits to the campus and to Hyde Park. I am not an alumnus of UChicago, but now I will always be connected to the University through my son. I imagine that I will continue to hope that the University goes from strength to strength and that the City of Chicago will find a way to make its worst problems less severe.
I’ve always read CC as another data source for thinking about the well being of my student at CC. First it was the decision to attend, then move-in, then major, then moving to an apartment, move-out, etc. Occasionally I’ve offered advice and encouragement if I thought it could help. This board has been helpful to me and I hope that once or twice I was helpful to others.
I have no idea how comprehensive the data is, but the road from Hyde Park to the Garfield ‘L’ stop seems about as safe as any area in less affluent parts of the South Side. There have been a couple of assaults, but Millenium Park (among other places) seems more dangerous. It’s Englewood to the west that’s truly dangerous.
This map also suggests the area isn’t a place to abandon all common sense, but is broadly similar to the rest of the city.
@NotVerySmart - The area JHS and I have been discussing is not the route from Hyde Park to the Garfield “L” stop. It is along 55th Street (Garfield) between I-90/94 and Midway Airport. This route includes the Englewood area which is the second most violent Chicago neighborhood according to the heyjackass.com website.
If you call the neighborhood “Englewood,” it’s one of the most notorious in Chicago in terms of crime. If you call it “New City,” it’s a couple of levels down from there. Guess what the official border between the neighborhood called Englewood and New City is? That’s right: Garfield Ave. / 55th St. Technically, I guess, if you were shot while riding the bus from Midway to Hyde Park, that would be an Englewood crime, while if it happened on the way from Hyde Park to Midway, it would be in the New City stats. Luckily, as far as I can tell, that theoretical categorization issue has never, ever arisen, because people don’t get shot on the CTA 55 bus, no matter which side of the street the bus is on.
Adding: The 59 bus, whose route is more clearly through Englewood, is by my lights a more pleasant ride. But I have only taken it a couple of times, when I was staying at International House (and that ain’t happening anymore), and it doesn’t run at all on Sunday, so it’s no good for a return trip on a weekend visit.
@JHS - Thanks for your previous post. The northern part of “New Town” consists of the Stockyards Industrial Park. As you can imagine, not many people live in the industrial park, and crime in this area is low. The southern part of “New Town” consists of housing stock, demographics and crime virtually indistinguishable from Englewood.
If you look at the following interactive map that tracks shootings, the area of the Stockyards (between Halsted and Ashland between 35th and 47th Streets) has almost no shootings. In contrast, the residential area south of 47th between Halsted and Ashland has nearly the same density of shootings as the Englewood area south of 55th Street.
The comment on New City was a bit silly but it is true that as you go north it gets safer with more blocks that aren’t complete pits of poverty, drugs, and despair. 63rd to 71st is the worst, 63rd to Garfield is better, and Garfield to 47th is even better. It’s hard to notice the difference looking at a shooting map that abstracts out all the detail, but on the ground it’s more obvious. If you had to choose a random block to get off in Englewood basically all of the Garfield and 63rd blocks at daylight are fine. There are some on the side that I would not go down at any hour by myself, and there are more of those blocks as you go south.
West Woodlawn (statistics are diluted by the rest of Woodlawn, which has Hyde Park levels of safety) and Washington Park (very low population density makes it look better) are just as bad/worse as Englewood, and tourists wonder into those on foot all the time and the worse thing that happens is occasionally someone gets mugged. The gun violence Chicago is infamous for is staggeringly unlikely to affect people who don’t live in the affected areas, even if they wander in.
The article about crime on the CTA found Addison as the most dangerous stop on the L. Y’know, that derelict stop in the middle of the terrifying south side…no, wait, it’s 100 feet from freaking Wrigley Field in one of the safest community areas in the city. If your bar for safety is so high that you think taking the CTA from Midway to UChicago is too dangerous, you probably won’t feel safe on the CTA at all. Some people are like that, that’s fine (uber exists!). But the CTA between Midway and UChicago isn’t any worse than the CTA anywhere else.
Btw, Garfield Red Line isn’t so bad. That article pegged it as a bad stop, not as the most dangerous. 47th Red Line is worse imo. It has the same design but with less people around in a worse neighborhood. Garfield has a bad design but it’s crowded enough (almost always with a few UofC people) that there are usually people around even until midnight. Later than that it’s very iffy and you have to worry about things happening, but luckily the 6 runs until 1.
The 47 doesn’t run all night, the 55 does. Basically no one is getting off at 47th at the most dangerous hours and waiting for the bus. You can’t really make a direct comparison.
Fine. I am convinced that the 55 is one of, if not the, most crime-ridden bus routes in Chicago. If so, that's a pretty good testament to the CTA.
As I understand that map -- and I have looked at it a lot since I found it yesterday -- it's telling us that since 2001 there have been 104 police crime reports with the words "CTA bus" in them for the entire stretch of Garfield/55 between Hyde Park and the Red Line Garfield station. So an average of about 7 per year. All of the crimes for which I can find specifics occurred at bus stops, not on the bus itself, but I couldn't find all 104 entries. No one traveling from Midway to the University of Chicago spends any time at a bus stop in that portion of the route. The TV report certainly suggests that crimes have occurred on the buses themselves -- although not necessarily on the 55.
The intersection of the Red Line and the 55 bus had more incidents than elsewhere – apart from Midway itself, that’s clearly the most used stop on the bus route – but it didn’t have anywhere near all of them, and maybe not quite a majority. Meanwhile, other easy-to-find data tells me that the 55 generates about 3.6 million rides/year. Not all of them pass through the Garfield - Hyde Park corridor, but I would bet that a bunch of them do.
So: the odds on this most dangerous of bus lines in its most dangerous stretch do not seem so awful.
Based on these filters, there were 1,268 crimes committed on CTA buses matching the route of Garfield/55, an average of 85 per year or once every 4.3 days. Most of those crimes occurred in the stretch between the expressway and Western Avenue.