Safety of CTA?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

Hello!! I’ve committed to UChicago and CAN’T WAIT to be on campus. :smiley: I’m sad though that the housing release date got moved though… crosses fingers for North

Anyway, I’ve heard that UChi students shouldn’t be taking the CTA, especially from the Red Line. Since I’m getting ready for O-Week and ready for moving on campus, I’m planning all of my routes for places I will go. For example, I know already that I want to visit “the Bean” (its real name is Cloud Gate). Should I expect to shell out $30 for an Uber or is the CTA safe? Does UChicago have shuttles to take me there? Thanks!

-FunkyMonkey22

2

CTA is safe. My daughter uses it all the time. Often solo during the day. Typically with others in the evening. If waiting on platforms makes you nervous, you can take buses. You’ll get an unlimited rides transit pass for trains/buses (excludes commuter rail) during O-week. The cost is bundled into your fees, so you’ve already paid for it – might as well use it!

3

Ditto. If you don’t want to take the Red Line or the Green Line, though, you can take the 6 express bus up Lakeshore Drive to a block from Millennium Park. Which you will love. Don’t forget to go to the Art Institute, too.

I think the university does have some shuttles to and from the South Loop area on Friday and Saturday nights, so you don’t have to deal with the Garfield stations on the Red and Green Lines. You will figure that out when you are there. But the CTA is absolutely your friend, don’t hesitate to use it. It has great apps, too – you can figure out where the next train or bus on any route is, exactly, in real time, so that you don’t have to stand around outside at a stop when the weather is bad. (Note: on occasion, the weather in Chicago is bad.)

4

Agree. I sure hope the CTA is safe because my son has used it extensively (almost daily) for 4 years. He’s in to town and back all the time. Side note: I agree about the Art Institute–what a treasure.

5

CTA is safe. UberPool and LyfeLine are dirt cheap nowadays and sometimes cost-competitive with the CTA.

6

Hi, yes the CTA is generally very safe. You will probably want to take either the #6 express bus from Hyde Park to downtown, but you can also take a bus to the Garfield Red Line station and then take the Red Line from there. Also the university has shuttles that take you to the South Loop Roosevelt Station and you can easily take the L further north from there. Hope that helps!

7

Use Metra when possible- CTA is safe within the city itself, but the trains going to the south side arent very well policed. One of my family members got mugged on the green line two stations before Garfield once.

8

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, misleading, and colored by racist assumptions/media distortion. A recent report by the Sun-Times found about 3,700 reported “index crimes” (everything from homicides to robberies/burglaries - and mostly the latter) over the two-year period spanning 2015 and 2016

See: http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/crime-on-cta-l-trains-buses-up-but-90-percent-of-serious-incidents-go-unsolved-the-watchdogs/

Ridership during that period totalled about 1.13 billion.

See p. 1 of this report: http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/ridership_reports/2016_Annual_-_Final.pdf

Let’s assume the above article is right that crimes on the CTA are underreported. Let’s even be wildly pessimistic and assume just 10% of crimes are reported.

The CTA still sees one crime for every 30,500 rides taken.

Let’s assume crime in the suburbs, which the CTA doesn’t publish numbers on, doubles the total (90% of bus stations and 85% of L rail stations are in Chicago, and the suburbs are wealthier than the city, so we’re just making stuff up at this point). It would take roughly 15,000 rides to fall victim to a serious crime on the CTA.

Let’s apply a “scary nonwhite area” multiplier of 5x to this already-inflated figure, since students will mostly take the CTA in/out of the South Side. It now takes 3,000 rides to fall victim to a serious crime.

Meanwhile the CTA is free (or rather, unlimited in return for a quarterly $95 fee every student has to pay whether they use the CTA or not) during Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters, and $2.25 when classes aren’t in session. It costs $4.00 to take the Metra from Hyde Park to Millennium Station. You’re paying a premium of somewhere between $1.75 and $4.00 (the difference between summer fares and Metra fares, and unlimited U-Pass travel and Metra fares, respectively) to avoid a 1-in-3000 chance of a robbery.

The 6 bus, by the way, will get you to virtually the same place as the Metra Electric, and runs 1-2 blocks to the east of the Metra’s Hyde Park leg.

Unless a student makes a habit of carrying somewhere between $5,250 (in the summer) and $12,000 (during the academic year) in cash and valuables on their person, the Metra is a really, really overpriced form of insurance against the distant possibility of a robbery and the virtually nonexistent chance of a more serious crime on the CTA.

We’ve assumed people never report crimes, the CTA is deliberately misleading us, and the South Side is in worse shape than Fox News viewers could ever imagine. These assumptions multiply the CTA’s published crime figures by 100 (!) and there’s still no compelling argument for the Metra over the CTA on safety grounds. And remember - this is assuming crime on the Metra is literally zero.

There are certainly reasons to take the Metra - maybe you live in I-House and don’t like buses, or you absolutely need to be downtown in 20 minutes, or you value the extra time a CTA trip involves (anywhere from 0 to 20 minutes depending on traffic and your destination) at more than $1.75. If you don’t live near the Green Line or the 6, or you’re rich enough that it’s “just” money (more common than you’d think on campus), there’s a legitimate argument for the last claim. There’s research that shows happiness, after a certain point, stems from spending money on goods and services that save you time, not more stuff. But none of these reasons have anything to do with safety.

Speaking personally (ugh, anecdotal evidence) I use the CTA more than most students, including frequent trips through Woodlawn/Washington Park, and have yet to see a crime take place on a bus or train, much less be the victim of one

9

@DunBoyer Am I understanding you that you think that the main damage from a robbery (defined as getting property through force or threat of force) is the loss of money?

10

@Lea111 The loss of money is the easiest damage to quantify, and in the case of thefts (the majority of CTA crime) it usually is the bulk of the damage. Other damages certainly exist - actual violence (in some robberies) or more serious crimes - but they’re vanishingly rare.

Here’s what the 2016 figures tell us: 1,442 thefts/larcenies (all nonviolent), 421 robberies (which include violence or the threat thereof), and a total of 1,873 index crimes. Assuming arson, burglary, and motor vehicle theft are nonexistent (I don’t believe anyone’s tried stealing or torching a bus lately) that leaves exactly 10 homicides, aggravated assaults/batteries, and sexual assaults over the course of a year. The article specifies that the CTA has seen one homicide over the two-year period the Sun-Times examined.

After we apply a wacky 100x multiplier to the reported crime statistics, we get 43,100 violent crimes in a year when 498 million rode the CTA. This includes the threat of violence as well as actual violence, and it’s still one crime for every 11,555 rides. You’d need to ride the CTA twice a day for 16 years to be a victim once. With a more realistic figure (say, 10x the published numbers) it would take an average of two lifetimes for this to happen. And most robberies involve threats of violence, not actual violence. As for the more serious crimes (assault, rape, or homicide), even with a 100x multiplier, they affect one rider for every half-million rides taken.

The damage caused by thefts isn’t nonexistent; besides the value of any items lost, there’s the hassle of replacing credit cards, ID, and so forth, and whatever psychological effect the theft has. Theft can be a disconcerting experience. But thefts are still rare, and the lasting effects of getting your pocket picked are minor compared to the effects of the crimes most people worry about - robberies, assault, rape, or homicide. Crimes which, the numbers say, are even less frequent.

Much like terrorism or airplane crashes, violent crime on the CTA is far rarer, with a lower aggregate effect, than other, less sensationalized threats to a student’s body, soul, and bank balance - like paying $4.00 for the Metra when they have a perfectly good U-Pass. Or, for that matter, crossing the street; a pedestrian is killed for every 55 million miles Chicagoans walk, while it took two years and a billion rides to see a death on the CTA.

There’s always a chance of being pickpocketed, robbed, or suffering a more serious crime on the CTA, but it’s hard to justify changing one’s behavior because of this fairly remote possibility.

11

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/somatic-psychology/201009/mugging-is-violent-traumatizing-crime

12

@Lea111 I take the point that an event of mugging-theft-burglary is more than a monetary transaction. However, barring the exceedingly rare prospect of actual physical injury, a young life need not be permanently scarred thereby. The advice I would give to a youngster is to think calmly of such things as part of life, certainly life as lived in a big city. If something of that sort happens, deal with it stoically. Several such events happened to me during my own UChicago days, and I detect no bad longterm effects. Quite the contrary, they added a dimension of reality to the bookish life of a student. I am not advocating any form of extreme risk-taking but merely the sort of rational analysis @DunBoyer makes, coupled with a sense that bad luck can happen anywhere but is perhaps more likely to happen in some places than others. The fact that there is a slight sense of danger in the air is in my mind part of the mystique of the University. Kids don’t mind a tincture of danger quite as much as we parents do. My old Chicago prof, Norman Maclean, describes this inclination of youth well in the beautiful book he wrote at the very end of his life: “Young Men and Fire”.

13

^^^

It’s a question of probabilities. Not that mugging is something to be taken lightly, but robberies on the CTA (a distinct category from thefts, which by definition involve no violence or threats of violence) are literally one in a million (according to the official numbers) or maybe one in 100,000 with some generous assumptions. Most fall into one of two categories:

  1. Someone tugs a purse/bag out of a passenger's grasp.
  2. Someone brandishes or implies the presence of a weapon, announced a robbery, and the victim hands over their property.

Both dwarf the frequency of actual assaults on a rider’s person, which in turn dwarfs the frequency of aggravated/sexual assault (a grand total of 10 incidents last year - maybe 100 if you make generous assumptions).

I won’t deny mugging has serious effects, but I disagree that its incidence should change any student’s behavior. A student is no more likely to be mugged on the CTA than they are while walking to the Metra on 53rd or 56th Street, and a mile walked or a mile driven carries more risks than a mile on the CTA. That’s not a particularly compelling rationale to stop taking the Metra - or the CTA. It’s a testament to the safety of the CTA, media histrionics and suburbanite perceptions aside. Just as an unbelievably high share of dips in the ocean don’t result in shark attacks, 99.99963% of CTA rides end without a crime, and 99.999948% end without a violent crime. I find this very reassuring.

14

@DunBoyer - are you saying that someone’s level of risk aversion or loss function can’t be altered by going through a traumatic experience? Seems to me that even if the probs don’t change, your perception of how much negative utility you can experience (trauma, after all, is certainly “negative utility”) can certainly cause you to alter future behavior. The social science models don’t look just at probability - they look at things like expected loss.

@Marlowe1, I’d argue that these are personal experiences with reactions perhaps as unique as our fingerprints. Encouraging someone not to be permanently altered is like advising them on how to grieve a love one’s death - irrelevant at best. Problem is, even if you’ve walked the walk, you haven’t walked in the same set of shoes. I also suspect that the experience for a woman might well be more traumatic than for a guy (but I don’t have evidence on hand to back that up).

15

I find these crime alerts to be a mixed blessing. Yes, I want to know what to be careful about, but each warning makes every one of the 15,000 students on campus feel like they just personally got mugged.

This is the same phenomenon that has the whole country feeling like we are in the midst of a crime wave while in reality crime has been falling in the USA for three straight decades.

16

@Lea111 The key difference in your article referenced is that the author assumes the “mugging” was violent which in turn is a traumatizing event. Being robbed is usually shocking but rarely traumatizing unless it becomes violent. IOW just hand over whatever valuables that you are carrying and let it go. Always report it, on the off chance you might get your property back.

17

@CU123 is there a “standard” on what constitutes “traumatizing”? Good grief. Also, what if you aren’t carrying any valuables? Nice Mugger is then going to say “sorry my mistake” and walk on?

18

@ThankYouforHelp at #14 - the issue is less whether violent crime in the country has fallen over the past 20 years (it has) than it is about whether violent crime in HP is on the increase from just a few years ago. @DunBoyer and @HydeSnark should be able to weigh in, but my impression is that it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-south-shore-violence-crime-chicago-edit-20170502-story.html

https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2017/1/20/property-crime-increased-violent-crime-decreased-h/

19

@JBStillFlying Have you ever been mugged? I have, I call it shocking but not traumatizing, I’ll grant you that different people will react differently to it. The article insinuated that every mugging is violent and traumatizing, I disagree.

20

No @CU123 I have not. I know several who have been with various outcomes from comical to traumatizing. You are not the only poster on this thread who has been mugged. Without speaking for anyone else I’m willing to take their word for it - as well as yours - that you all are relating your reactions honestly. They can be very different.