<p>How do students who don't have cars (which I'm guessing are most of them) get to Downtown Chicago from campus. And how often to most students venture into Downtown??</p>
<p>There’s some sort of shuttle/bus. And of course, there’s always the option of walking!</p>
<p>Chicago campus is too far from downtown to walk (~7 miles). You can take the 6, which goes from Hyde Park to Michigan Avenue, or you can take the 55 to the Red Line and get off on State St. wherever you’d like.</p>
<p>do students get a upass?</p>
<p>No. There’s constant whining about that, but the university does not pony up to the CTA for the upass (which costs hundreds of dollars per year). In the past, at least, they gave first-years prepaid CTA cards with $10 or $15 on them, which the students could recharge themselves. I got my kids evergreen CTA cards linked to my credit card, because I didn’t want them not to go somewhere because they didn’t feel like paying for the bus. It probably wound up costing me ~$100/kid/year average.</p>
<p>To get downtown, there’s a shuttle, the 6 bus, the 55 bus to the Red Line, the Green Line (which is more convenient to South Campus, but which I think some students don’t feel comfortable taking), and the Metra trains (more expensive, not on the CTA system, but faster and more comfortable). Students with cars will use them to get to other neighborhoods in Chicago or outside it, but not so much the downtown area, where parking costs make using a car really expensive.</p>
<p>As for how often students venture out of Hyde Park, the answer varies widely depending on the student. For some, it’s almost never. For others, it’s at least a couple times a week. It also depends on where they are in the course of a quarter. Students are far more likely to be going downtown third week than tenth week, whatever their baseline is.</p>
<p>“Downtown”, by the way, isn’t the only place people go. There are lots of places that are hipper for students than downtown, including neighborhoods like Belmont, Wrigleyville, Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village, Pilsen, or Chinatown (which, OK, is sorta downtown). It’s like New York these days – a twenty-something is more likely to be spending time in Williamsburg than in mid-town Manhattan.</p>
<p>My daughter got out of Hyde Park frequently and also ventured widely, I think most often via bus. Of late, she’s also bicycled. There are bike paths all along the lake.</p>
<p>Yes. It’s not uncommon to bicycle along the lake. What’s more, while it’s a long way to walk downtown (about 7 miles), it’s not that far to bicycle. Chicago is superflat – except for a few bridges, there’s no struggling uphill in first gear.</p>