Save 171 Service

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University of Chicago

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# 109:

12:40 pm PDT, Sep 29, Mike Emerson, Illinois

# 108:

11:43 pm PDT, Jun 26, Kristy Ironside, Illinois
I used to live at 55th and Dorchester this past year and I frequently was unable to get on the bus, because it was too full. Sometimes more than one full bus passed me by.

# 107:

1:01 pm PDT, Jun 10, Ahmet Tunc Sen, Illinois
A.Tunc Sen

# 106:

12:51 pm PDT, Jun 7, Name not displayed, Illinois
I believe that decreasing the service of the 171 will lead to even greater traffic and safety inconveniences than students already experience. Broadview students are already unable to get onto the 171 unless they wait at the 55th/Hyde Park Boulevard stop in the mornings, when the buses are running every four minutes, so reducing the frequency of the buses and the distance east that they travel will severely disadvantage these students.

# 105:

5:28 pm PDT, Jun 5, Diana Harper, Illinois

# 104:

12:56 pm PDT, Jun 5, Name not displayed, Illinois
The 171 and 172 are desperately needed - please don't cut the frequency of either of them! In addition, neither of them service Breckinridge House at the moment - although the 171 drives right past I-House, all Breckinridge riders have to watch in agony as the bus drives another three blocks before it will let them off. Please change this! Campus transportation on all levels is already infrequent enough - cutting down the frequency of any popular shuttle or bus service will NOT help!

# 103:

2:29 pm PDT, Jun 4, Mitch Salm, Illinois
Please leave your name, areas of study, and location, if possible.

# 102:

12:16 pm PDT, Jun 4, Julia Marks, Illinois
Please leave your name, areas of study, and location, if possible.

# 101:

11:58 am PDT, Jun 4, James Weaver, Illinois
I am a student and employee of the University of Chicago. The 171 is very important to this neighborhood as it helps the many people who work at the University connect to other stops where they can pick up their main transportation home. Don't end this service.

# 100:

11:13 am PDT, Jun 4, Name not displayed, Illinois
Please leave your name, areas of study, and location, if possible.

# 99:

12:56 pm PDT, Jun 3, Jordan Dexter, Illinois

# 98:

6:26 pm PDT, Jun 2, Name not displayed, Illinois

# 97:

4:30 pm PDT, Jun 2, Catherine Easton, Illinois

# 96:

4:19 pm PDT, Jun 2, Daniel Roche, Illinois

# 95:

4:18 pm PDT, Jun 2, Laurie Skelly, Illinois

# 94:

3:38 pm PDT, Jun 2, Anna Rae Goethe, Illinois

# 93:

3:19 pm PDT, Jun 2, Skyla Lambeth, Illinois

# 92:

5:42 am PDT, Jun 2, Diane Schirf, Illinois

# 91:

5:24 am PDT, Jun 2, Allison Urbanik, Illinois

# 90:

9:00 am PDT, Jun 1, Melissa Tan, Illinois

# 89:

8:17 pm PDT, May 31, Name not displayed, Illinois

# 88:

6:45 pm PDT, May 31, Name not displayed, Illinois

# 87:

7:54 am PDT, May 31, Bo Peng, Illinois

# 86:

6:50 pm PDT, May 30, Helen Cowdrey, Illinois

# 85:

5:56 pm PDT, May 30, C C Schenk, North Carolina

# 84:

3:27 pm PDT, May 30, Maria Alexander, Illinois

# 83:

2:16 pm PDT, May 30, Tobias Tieger, Illinois

# 82:

12:48 pm PDT, May 30, Name not displayed, Illinois

# 81:

11:39 am PDT, May 30, Betsy Franz, Illinois

# 80:

10:45 am PDT, May 30, Melissa --, Illinois
Melissa, Undergraduate, E 55th St & S Hyde Park Blvd

# 79:

10:15 am PDT, May 30, Cristina Simpetru, Illinois

# 78:

9:50 am PDT, May 30, Name not displayed, Illinois

# 77:

9:36 am PDT, May 30, Roxana Mihet, Illinois

# 76:

8:58 am PDT, May 30, Joseph Grim Feinberg, Illinois

# 75:

1:50 pm PDT, May 29, Owen Kohl, Illinois
This area of Chicago needs more public transportation options, not less. This strikes me as shortsighted.

# 74:

12:10 pm PDT, May 29, Name not displayed, Illinois

# 73:

11:08 am PDT, May 29, Lara Felkner, Illinois

# 72:

10:45 am PDT, May 29, Nitzan Shoshan, Illinois

# 71:

9:26 am PDT, May 29, Phil Redman, Illinois
I use this bus every day. Please let me keep doing that.

# 70:

8:59 am PDT, May 29, Anjanette Chan Tack, Illinois
To the administrators: As a graduate student at the University, I matriculated believing that I was entering a contract with the University and my department. In exchange for a loss of alternate earnings, the department and the university would provide me with the support I needed to become a serious scholar and a top flight professional. I thus matriculated with with the expectation that the university would provide the support services that its peer institutions commonly provide for their graduate students. Access to timely, regular and affordable transportation from home to work is vital to ensuring worker efficiency and maximizing worker productivity. The importance of low cost, efficient, and sufficiently frequent public transportation is well recognized by urban planners, municipal officials, economists and policy makers. I would be shocked if administrators at this University, with their intelligence, education and foresight, could be ignorant or unimpressed by the returns to worker productivity that are gained by reducing the commute time to work and its associated hassles. The fact that administrators are intent on reducing the 171 bus service suggests that they are in fact unaware of the basic value-adding significance of decent transportation infrastructure. Since this is the case, let me take pains to clearly explain the essential supportive role that the 171 plays in enabling graduate student work. Its role becomes clear when we combine this economistic good sense with an ecological view of the spatial organization of the university, and the constraints it imposes on a workers' productivity, the essential role of the 171 in facilitating graduate productivity becomes clear. I live in greater East hyde park and, despite the 171's problems I have long been grateful for the 171's frequency, its low cost and its route. Like many students in the humanities and social science division, I do not have an office space. Everyday I must transport my office to work: my laptop, my books, other work-related materials. And everyday I must reconfigure a temporary office space somewhere on the campus. The need to reconfigure and transport my office every day takes a daily toll on time lost when I could be working. It has also taken a toll on my health. Over the last 2 years, I have developed serious lower back pain as a result of having to carry my laptop, books and other office materials on my back everyday, several times a day. This has lead to medical costs (MRIs, physiotherapy) and more lost money, time and productivity. The 171 service in its current form reduced these burdens -- both to my body and to my time -- in helping me get to work with less manual strain and more quickly. The 171's reduced schedule in the summer time has long been a cause for serious inconvenience and time-loss. This, combined with the fact that few food providers are open on campus in the summer means that working graduate students have to either carry lunch and dinner as extra loads on their backs or they have to drag their laptops with them around hyde park at lunch and dinner in search of food -- losing more time and enduring more physical strain. I shudder to think of the massive inefficiencies and strains to my body that will occur year round if the 171 service is scaled back. As we all know, Chicago is infamous for its extended, severe winters and frequent heavy downpours in the spring. The problem of getting from work to school are severely exacerbated by the burdens of inclement weather. Can you imagine what it is like to trek a mile to school in snow shoes, bundled against the cold, trying not to slip on black ice, and trundling through the snow with a backpack and bags heavy with books and computer equipment? I am sure that if you, the administrators who are considering scaling back the 171, did not have the luxury of cars or offices you would not endure such added daily burden lightly. Obviously, the implications of this are not only personal. The inefficiencies, and health costs will be ramified across the entire student population living in east hyde park, both graduates and undergraduates alike. In particular, the logic behind the university's interest in reducing the 171 bus service can only be seen as a monetarily driven, community-insensitive move. The University seems to think that the 171 service is both necessary and worthy of support when it is ferrying undergraduates (with their fat, endowment enhancing tuition payments) back and forth, but not when it is mostly servicing graduate students. The severely reduced summer hours for bus service has long been a clear signal of the University's overarching priorities to please and facilitate its undergrads without regard to its graduate student population. A unilateral decision by the university to restrict the 171 bus service in the face of firm and vociferous opposition by its graduate student population is yet another insult to its graduate students. As it is, we have inadequate healthcare, scarce teaching positions that were contractually promised to us on matriculation, and poor financial support that reduces our time to degree. We have a university that has historically ignored graduate student needs, and has only just begun a germinal transition to welcoming graduate student opinions in its planning processes. The university did have a meeting about the future of the 171 last Thursday, but while the administrators officially welcomed comments and criticisms, in actuality, graduate student concerns about the negative effects of scaling back the 171 service were ignored. I urge the university to preserve the 171 in its current form. I also urge it to cease using open planning fora as ritual genuflections and feigned commitments to democratic and self-critical administrative decision-making. Finally, I urge it to emulate its peer institutions in taking the practical, professional and ecological needs of its graduate student population seriously. Anjanette M. Chan Tack Graduate in the Department of Sociology. [*] As an aside, I note here that the ecological perspective on the efficient organization of urban space was pioneered by sociologists at the U of C and is routinely used by economists and urban planners everywhere. These ideas should neither be alien or valueless to the administrators at our great institution. Moreover, the applicablility of the ecological perspective to our the current problem is a clear illustration of the kind of public goods that graduates of Chicago's departments produce for the world, and is alone a strong argument in favor of better investment in facilites and policies that enable graduate student productivity.

# 69:

7:53 am PDT, May 29, Marcelle Pierson, Illinois

# 68:

7:41 am PDT, May 29, Paki Reid-Brossard, Illinois
The 171 is essential for getting me from home (Everett Ave) to the south border of campus on a daily basis and irreplaceable for making that journey during the cold of winter and other inclement weather. Despite the great improvements made in the last few years, supply has never met the demand for this route.

# 67:

9:47 pm PDT, May 28, Mara Marin, Illinois

# 66:

6:56 pm PDT, May 28, Laura Goodrich, Illinois

# 65:

3:19 pm PDT, May 28, Name not displayed, Illinois

# 64:

1:34 pm PDT, May 28, Name not displayed, Illinois
phd candidate medical physics md/phd

# 63:

9:27 am PDT, May 28, Kaitlin Samocha, Illinois

# 62:

8:52 am PDT, May 28, Name not displayed, Illinois

# 61:

5:55 pm PDT, May 27, Fay Kelly, Illinois

# 60:

5:07 pm PDT, May 27, Jen Hart, Illinois

# 59:

4:56 pm PDT, May 27, Daniel Forbush, Illinois

# 58:

2:54 pm PDT, May 27, Kimberly Beiting, Illinois
Please keep the frequent 171 bus route. Oftentimes, it's the only way I can get to where I'm going on time! As a college student with no car, the 171 is a lifesaver for my travel around Hyde Park.

# 57:

12:47 pm PDT, May 27, Alyssa Mathias, Illinois

# 56:

8:52 am PDT, May 27, Ksenia Konkina, Illinois

# 55:

1:19 am PDT, May 27, Gene Kopp, Illinois
Gene Kopp, mathematics major in the college, living in Burton-Judon. I use the 171 to get to Walgreens, Treasure Island, etc. I lived in the Shoreland last year, and the 171 would repeatedly pass by the Broadview stop because it was too full. Broadview residents have been getting shafted by the 171 for long enough; the 171 should stay frequent in the morning and be rerouted to pass by Broadview.

# 54:

11:29 pm PDT, May 26, Name not displayed, Illinois
What about Broadview? Please be considerate of us!

# 53:

9:22 pm PDT, May 26, Nathaniel Berry, Illinois

# 52:

3:24 pm PDT, May 26, Name not displayed, Illinois
The Shoreland's residents are not the only riders of the 171.

# 51:

12:57 pm PDT, May 26, Holly Lawson, Illinois

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