The Department of Public Safety has made some great strides this year in the services that it offers. The Bias Incident Reporting System and improvements in emergency response, such as the cell phone alerts, have been widely praised and indicate the close attention DPS has paid to the needs of the student body. Despite this obvious progress, DPS still needs to improve the quality and effectiveness of one of its most important services: the SafeRides program.

I live up in Burleith, and I like to take SafeRides back to my apartment if it is too late when I head for home, even if my roommates think this is wimpy. Georgetown is a relatively safe neighborhood, but students walking alone at night, often carrying valuables like laptops, make this area pretty attractive for petty criminals. SafeRides is an excellent idea, and many students, whether returning from the library or the Tombs, have DPS to thank for their safe journeys home.

With a few changes, DPS can make SafeRides more popular among students living off-campus and better able to live up to its mission of assuring students a safe trip home. One notable area of concern is the lack of adequate communication among the drivers, the operator and the student getting picked up. I’ve heard from many people that operators often tell those requesting a ride that the SafeRides van will pick them up at a nearby corner in approximately 10 minutes. Oftentimes, however, this wait turns out to be much longer.

An obvious problem here is that students, sometimes alone, are standing on an isolated street corner, waiting for the van for up to a half-hour. Compounding this problem is that these students, when calling the operator, find that they cannot get accurate information about where the van is or when it will actually arrive. One night, after having several vans speed by me on the corner where I was told to wait, I called the operator and told him that I would just walk home. He told me that that was fine and to “have a safe night.” There was apparently a breakdown in communications that prevented DPS from providing this service effectively that night.

Of course, we cannot expect the SafeRides operators to know exactly where the vans are or ask them to give us an estimated time of arrival down to the second. However, there are other ways to solve this problem. One solution would be to relay the cell phone numbers of callers to the vans’ drivers to allow the drivers to directly call students from in front of a particular address. This would improve student safety by keeping students off dark street corners at night and effectively eliminate the need to constantly badger the operator about where the van is.

There has been a marked improvement in the time it takes for a SafeRides van to pick someone up since last year. Additionally, requesting students to try to hop on the shuttle loop when near its route, instead of calling a van, is not an unreasonable demand. American University has equipped its shuttles with GPS, and students can send texts that both find out the location of a shuttle and request a pick-up. Integrating this system would help keep students informed about the location of SafeRides vehicles and allow more direct and efficient communications.

Another change that DPS should consider is the hours of operation of SafeRides. It runs from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. from Sunday through Wednesday and until 3 a.m. from Thursday through Saturday. The shuttles, running on set loops to Burleith and West Georgetown, start a little later – around 10 p.m. – and they only run Thursday through Saturday. Eight o’clock is way too early to start SafeRides, and it is more necessary later in the night. Even if the loop stops running at these particular times, there should be a SafeRides vehicle on call until at least 4 a.m., especially once finals begin and students are at the library at all hours of the night. While the program currently satisfies the needs of early studiers, many Georgetown students prefer to stay at the library until much later, and having at least one SafeRides van operating late would improve the service for these students.

DPS has also made an effort to make some SafeRides vehicles handicap accessible, a more than necessary improvement. Disabled students need this service, especially during bad weather, and the changes expected to be made and tested in the near future are a positive development for the inclusiveness of the program. It is another indication of the close attention that DPS pays to the needs of Georgetown students.

Overall, SafeRides is an important and successful program, but with a little room for improvement in its execution. Making communications easier, whether through direct contact between drivers and students or the use of a GPS system, would greatly enhance the effectiveness of SafeRides, and extending the program’s on-call hours would make it more accessible for all students. Based on the responsiveness DPS has had this year to safety incidents and student concerns, I bet these problems could be solved before the end of the semester.

Stephen Kenny is a senior in the College. He can be reached at kennythehoya.com. AGAINST THE WIND appears every other Tuesday.

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