Why Some Colleges Have Abandoned In-House Safe-Ride Programs in Favor of Uber, Lyft, or Via

Losing her job with Northwestern University’s in-house Safe Ride service isn’t the only thing worrying Emma Latz, a senior, about the institution’s new contract with a private ride-sharing company.

“As a passenger in the car, it really did make me feel a lot more comfortable knowing the driver was a student,” said Latz. The global-health and biology major was among a handful of students to speak out against the university’s decision, formally announced on Wednesday, to discontinue the old Safe Ride program and pilot a new one with Via during the 2019-20 academic year.

Latz recalled one scenario at Safe Ride in which other riders complained about a male driver “with a little bit of a reputation on campus of disrespecting women and their personal space.” Latz said she and her coworkers alerted their manager, who terminated the driver. “My concern is that things like that will feel less comfortable to bring up in spaces” not staffed by fellow students.

But Northwestern’s move to outsource Safe Ride — and replace its fleet of university-provided cars with privately hired drivers and their vehicles — is far from unusual.

In recent years, several other colleges, including Ohio State University and the Universities of Florida and of Southern California, have contracted with ride-share companies to offer safe rides. That means offering students discounted, often free, night-time rides in the campus vicinity, accessible through existing ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft.

In the case of Northwestern, Safe Ride suffered high turnover and failed to meet the growing demand for rides, said Jim Roberts, executive director of division services.

“We would get these long wait times. Students would cancel rides, and we assume they were walking … which may have been putting them in more danger,” Roberts said. Northwestern is also creating a 24-7 help line for students using Via, as well as crafting clear signage for the vehicles. “There are risks driving with a student who’s been in classes all day and then driving from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m.,” Roberts said. “But aside from those risks, because the program wasn’t sustainable, it just wasn’t available to a lot of students.”

Latz said working those hours was “hard sometimes.” But when coursework filled her 9 to 5 hours, Safe Ride lent flexibility to “pull things together during financially tight times.” The Daily Northwestern said Safe Ride employed almost 30 students.

In overhauling the program, Northwestern looked at how other universities have handled the rising popularity of safe-ride services, which Roberts suspects is partly due to “students — and people in general — feeling less safe than they previously did.”

The University of Southern California became one of the first universities to try out the private ride-sharing model in 2015, when it contracted with Uber to supplement Campus Cruiser, its decades-old, campus-run safe-rides program.

“We noticed a sharp increase in the number of students who needed that kind of transportation,” Tony Mazza, director of auxiliary-services transportation at Southern California, said, noting a problem similar to Northwestern’s: Students were walking to nearby fraternity row and other popular watering holes. “We preferred a much safer way for them to get from point A to point B,” Mazza said. “The shared-ride concept, with both Uber and Lyft, was ideal for the university environment because there’s students riding with other students” within that two-mile boundary.

The university has since signed a new contract with Lyft. Between that and Campus Cruiser, students average 38,000 free rides per week.

However, the increasing popularity of these partnerships comes amid high-profile safety incidents involving the two leading ride-sharing companies, Uber and Lyft. Numerous passengers have reported sexual assaults and kidnappings by drivers. In March, a University of South Carolina student died after getting into a car with a man she mistook as an Uber driver, who has been charged with her murder.. Uber directed questions to its campus-safety initiative, which would not disclose how many partnerships the company has with colleges. Lyft did not respond to The Chronicle’s interview request.

“We’ve not had any unfortunate incidents,” Mazza said of Southern California’s third-party-operated Safe Ride program, which has also posted ride-sharing safety tips on its website. “We’ve had some little things pop up, where students have complained about a driver and we’ve sent that information to Lyft. If it’s serious enough, they’ll boot that driver.”

Via, which also has contracts with Harvard and Northeastern Universities, has “taken extra steps to vet drivers, only accepting drivers with the highest ratings, customer feedback, and overall driving records,” to staff the program at Northwestern, Dillon Twombly, Via’s chief revenue officer, said in an email.

All three companies conduct criminal background checks before hiring drivers, but that assurance wasn’t enough for students at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, which introduced an internal safe-rides program this summer. “We’ve been reading about other universities that have partnered with Uber or Lyft to provide nighttime campus transit,” said Alma Allred, executive director of commuter services. “But we found out that if we wanted to provide a program that also supplied the driver, the students were more likely to use the service if the driver was also a student at the university.”

Robert Witkop, a sophomore at Utah, is one of those newly hired drivers. He likes the “ability to do school work if no one is requesting a ride.” On top of that, he said he’s making $15.30 per hour, more than double Utah’s minimum wage.

That’s even more than Latz, the Northwestern student who worked for Safe Ride for two years before Via took over. On the campus in Evanston, Ill., where the minimum wage is $12.00 per hour, she earned $14.25, the highest pay grade for work-study jobs at the university. Northwestern has reached out to former Safe Ride employees, offering to help them find new on-campus jobs. But given the “haphazard” way things ended, Latz, who already has one retail gig, plans to look elsewhere for part-time work.

And an extra paycheck isn’t the only thing she’s lost.

“Because it was so appealing to people who needed second jobs, I found a good community of low-income students — a lot of women of color as well,” Latz said. “On a predominantly wealthy campus, it’s pretty hard to do that.”

Kathryn Palmer is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @kathrynbpalmer, or email her at kathryn.palmer@chronicle.com.