 "Photo: Joey Baker")
It's 3:30 a.m. The bank is closed.
A student needs to make a direct money withdrawal - immediately. But it's too late, time's up. The bank is closed.
"And that is part of life. It is the life experience," said Major Grant Williams, assistant director for crime prevention and community relations for the Department of Public Safety.
This is the hypothetical situation that Williams uses to describe Syracuse University's final bus departure. But as security escalates to an omnipresent national issue, many people at universities do not find that safety can be compared to a hypothetical situation.
"I walk alone at night, and I'm starting to get a little nervous. I wish the school's services could help me out a little more," said Emily Allen, an undecided freshman.
At SU, transit systems aim to ensure students and faculty safety - including Centro buses and Public Safety's Marshal Service. But main operations cease between the hours of 3:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m., which leaves few options for refuge. Some perceive this transportation blackout as a curfew.
As assistant director for crime prevention, Williams has worked at Public Safety for 39 years and has devoted most of his life to students at SU.
"I am student centered. If someone cannot tell I have student interest in mind, then I have not done my job," he said. "The last thing I want is for a student who needs a safe ride at 3:30 a.m. to not be escorted safely."
Public Safety arranges a Student Marshal escort service to accompany students and faculty safely to specified destinations. The program runs from 5 p.m. until 3 a.m.
"The program has to shut down at a certain time. It is student run, and they have other things to do, too," Williams said.
If a phone call is placed to the Public Safety hotline after 3 a.m., a Public Safety officer will escort the student to a suitable destination.
"We will give escorts 24/7. We advertise this and stand by this," Williams said. "We are not going to turn a student down."
Public Safety does not provide the service to students beyond the campus jurisdiction area. South Campus is considered outside this area, and escorts are not available to the apartment complex. The buses perform that duty, said C.J. McCurty, Public Safety crime prevention manager.
"Of all the people that Public Safety should cater to with its escort service, it should be to the residents of South Campus," said Rachel Gruber, a freshman newspaper journalism major.
An officer will make sure that the student has a safe method of transportation to South Campus, McCurty said. A few of the officers will even walk a student to South Campus for the exercise.
"We will walk a student to the nearest bus stop. And if something were to happen, if the bus to South Campus was delayed, we are not going to leave someone stranded at the bus stop," Williams said.
The bus stops are in well-lit places and the blue light security system adds an extra sense of security, Gruber said. And arriving in time to catch a scheduled bus adds a sense of personal responsibility, she added.
Yet Gruber still will not walk to the bus station alone.
"I do feel that they impose a curfew on South Campus residents," Gruber said. "And that floors me."
Gruber usually makes a pack of her friends escort her to a bus station, but that still becomes a hassle to make friends get up at early morning hours or cut their night short, she said.
"At two in the morning, I would consider calling Public Safety - depending on the conditions," Gruber said. "The one time I called Public Safety, they were very uninformed and unhelpful."
Gruber once contacted Centro transportation and Public Safety when a 10:38 a.m. bus did not arrive on a Sunday when she was scheduled to work.
"I called Centro and asked why - apparently there was a race at Manley, obstructing the bus route and buses weren't running until it was over," Gruber said. "I called Public Safety and asked what to do. They were not properly informed either."
A quick e-mail notifying students of the schedule change could have fixed the problem, Gruber said.
"There is very poor communication between Public Safety and the bus system, which makes things inconvenient and puts people in an unsafe position," Gruber said.
If there is something on which the safety squad falls short, it regroups and retrains, Williams said.
"We don't want the image that we don't care," Williams said. "None of us are perfect. We are human, though we try our best in every situation."
"I certainly don't want anyone saying we don't do something because it's past a certain time," Williams said. "If buses aren't running, we have got to come up with a solution."
When the buses are running, the transportation during the day and on weekends is great. But nights are a different story, said Allen, SU freshman.
"It's totally true and pretty ridiculous that there's a curfew. Some of my friends who go to other schools have actually asked me about this," Allen said.
And all it takes is someone to voice concern directly to SU's Parking and Transit Services for other options to be addressed. The realm of mass transit has always been demand driven, said Al Sauer, director of Parking and Transit Services.
Operating buses until 3:30 a.m. is still 21 hours of service a day, Sauer said.
"This is really the first time I have heard people looking to extend the service to 24 hours at all times during the academic year, and I have been around seven years," Sauer said, who works with the Office of Student Life to come up with a timely schedule. "If the students feel that it is important, then they should address it to us, and we will look into it to do a feasibility study."
On April 1, Centro bus service introduced a "South Campus 10 minute night service," operating to and from South Campus every 10 minutes between 7:40 p.m. and 3:30 a.m.
"This was clearly something we had worked through during a committee. Our students were saying we are waiting 20 or 30 minutes, and that's too long to wait," Sauer said. "We met with different groups of students, especially those at South Campus."
During finals week, the E.S. Bird Library remains open for 24 hours to accommodate student studying schedules.
In response, a new "finals week" policy was initiated in spring 2007, providing a 24-hour service during finals week from The Warehouse to North Campus, and from North Campus to South Campus. This service will continue every fall and spring semester henceforth.
"It really wasn't safety focused, though," Sauer said. "Sure, the less time you are waiting on the street corner, the less chance there is of being victimized. But mainly students wanted to be able to get to campus quicker and return quicker."
All the issues brought to the transit services have been addressed, Sauer said.
"Last spring, Centro did not have the resources to implement huge changes," Sauer said. "So, we prioritized and got the most important issues resolved as soon as we could."
The rest of the issues from last spring have been resolved this fall. Providing longer hours to bus access was never discussed.
"We do a lot of our own monitoring of the buses so that students aren't bypassed. And this has never been a concern," Sauer said.
The SU Centro system could extend its hours based on a need of the student majority, said Gerald Tabiri, a graduate student studying electrical engineering.
The bus transportation system serves the greater community, so it's hard to put blame on a public service for student safety at night, Tabiri said.
"For now, I think 3 (a.m.) is good," he said. "I understand that some people may think that it is like a curfew, but you don't expect a lot of people to be out at three in the morning anyway."
If 24-hour service is on the radar, then the department knows what steps to follow, Sauer said.
With an increase in the number of students coming to universities, it is difficult to pick up everyone that needs a ride, especially at larger universities such as University of Maryland and SU, said Myra Basar, assistant director of the Department of Transportation Services at UMD.
"There have been recent safety concerns on campus in comparison to previous years, so we have put much more of our resources on to night rides," Basar said.
UMD offers a Night Ride van service that runs when it has regular bus service, but it covers that gap when it has no bus service. It is free and is included in student fees.
"When the bus routes are in effect, we ask that people take the bus unless they are somewhere that is not served by a regular bus route," Basar said.
Students sometimes get frustrated when they call the dispatch office and are told to take the bus or call an alternate method of transportation, Basar said. The UMD dispatch office concentrates its efforts on getting safe rides for students on the outskirts of campus first.
"If we offered everyone curb-to-curb van service, there would be no need for buses," Basar said.
More than 100 students are also using the newly implemented Terp Taxi, a new service that runs from 5:30 a.m. until 3:30 a.m. the next day. For $5 that can be swiped to a student Bursar account, the taxi will take a student within a quarter mile outside campus limits.
The Department of Public Safety at UMD offers many services to ensure student safety and does not try to limit student affairs due to lack of dependable transportation, said Dean Rohan, dispatch supervisor of Public Safety at UMD.
"We don't encourage people to be in their rooms by 3 a.m.," Rohan said. "It will be a different responder depending on what time - but it is always there."
Public Safety at UMD provides a safety escort service that employs approximately 80 Student Police Aids (SPA).
"We shy away from driving people home because they will try and abuse that privilege," Rohan said. "We have a shuttle service that is getting ready to go 24 hours with over a dozen routes for that."
But at the same time, the SPAs are on duty until 2 a.m., and the van is on duty until 3 a.m., said Niven McCall Mazza, a sophomore at UMD.
"No matter the situation, if I am walking around at night, I always carry mace with me - and I think most girls do, too," Mazza said.
Mazza has used the Night Ride twice, but she said she would never call an escort service or police officer to walk her home. She has no idea how to contact them.
"I'm sure it's hard for campus security because college students are too self-conscious to use their service," Mazza said. "I would feel awkward having a police officer walk me home and most other people would, too."
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