The undergraduate student government and the Panhellenic Council are planning to reinstitute SAFERIDE, a program that provides transportation for women who have to walk home in the early hours of the morning.
The program will initially run on Thursday nights in spring quarter, and it will be operated by drivers of the evening van service. Currently, the evening van service provides transportation only until 11 p.m. Both USAC and the Panhellenic Council hope that SAFERIDE will expand this service into the early hours of the morning.
“We’re looking for an extension of the evening van service, so that girls that are out late don’t have to walk back by themselves,” said Megan Ward, the Panhellenic Council vice president for public relations. “Hopefully this will be an all-night service, though any extension would be helpful.”
According to the Daily Bruin archives, the program is meant for women, though the drivers can decide for themselves whom they wish to transport.
Ward said that since the program will be an extension of the evening van service, no outside organizations will be contracted to help.
“We plan to use the drivers of the evening van service, and we hope that the university matches the $100 to $200 each sorority house on Hilgard plans to contribute,” she said.
SAFERIDE aims to offer rides to women who need to get from the apartments and fraternity houses on Gayley Avenue to sorority houses on Hilgard Avenue, said Dianne Tanjuaquio, the internal vice president for Undergraduate Students Association Council.
The program received very favorable reviews from UCLA’s Greek community when it underwent a test run in 2005, and organizers said they hope it garners the same praise this time around.
“We’re hoping to get it started next quarter, and we hope it will be here to stay,” Ward said. “We’ve had people working on this for a while.”
Though the current plan is for SAFERIDE to initially run only on Thursday nights, Ward said she hopes the program will eventually be able to run every night of the week.
“Hopefully we will get the funding to get it extended to the whole week,” she said.
Many universities around the nation already use programs similar to SAFERIDE to assist their students, and those programs are quite popular, Tanjuaquio said.
Margaret Yu, a member of the Kappa Delta sorority, said she plans to take advantage of the service when it is implemented.
She added that most people don’t realize how long the walk is from Gayley Avenue to Hilgard Avenue.
“Imagine walking all the way from the dorms to the farthest end of campus, and then you still have to walk farther to get to your house,” she said.
The benefits of SAFERIDE extend beyond simply avoiding a late night walk home.
“When it gets really late and they don’t want to walk all the way back, usually girls decide to stay the night, and when they’ve been drinking, they sometimes make bad decisions,” Yu said.