Education junior Jess Filante ducks into a Student Escort Service car near Fisk Hall on a cold, drizzly Thursday night.
It’s not late — about 9 p.m. — and the evening falls more than three months since a Northwestern student last reported an attack or mugging. The drive to Filante’s apartment at the corner of Ridge Avenue and Noyes Street is a short one.
“I’m just really lazy,” she said.
Filante admitted to bumming rides off of Escort Service several times per week. She frequently takes rides from the gym, University Library and other South Campus buildings to her apartment. It’s just more convenient — and safer, she said.
Several months ago, when headlines of muggings were a daily routine and parents bombarded university officials with frightened calls and e-mails, administrators pushed drivers to come to the rescue. Overworked and unprepared to meet demand, several employees went on strike. The service nearly buckled under the pressure.
Now, after an overhaul that has led to a doubling of the service’s staff and fleet of cars, a shuffle of leadership and improvements in dispatch, the once-loosely run group has slashed wait times and transformed into a slick team of efficient taxis.
This fact has been met with approval from riders — but not necessarily from all employees.
BIGGER, BETTER?
“The service had to get a lot more professional,” said Bill Rowe, a Weinberg senior and one of Escort Service’s two student coordinators. “And for some people, that was hard. It was sort of like a club before — but now it’s like a real job.”
In response to explosive student demand following the string of attacks against students Fall and Winter quarters, administrators decided it was time to overhaul the service.
“My goal was to stabilize the Escort Service for this academic year — to take a chance to take a very hard look at it,” said William Banis, NU’s vice president for student affairs, whose division oversees the service. “We’re still in that evaluative process.”
In almost every respect, Escort Service has doubled in size. Staff has increased to 54 employees from about 20 in the fall. The service now employs twice as many drivers, twice as many cars, twice as many student and faculty administrators, and twice as many dispatchers on duty at any given time.
The most telling result of these changes is the plunge in wait times, Rowe said. Students once waited on average about 40 minutes for a ride earlier in the year. Thanks to a bigger staff and a more streamlined dispatching process, that average time has been cut to between 10 and 20 minutes, Rowe said.
“People used to be like, ‘Oh it’s half an hour — I don’t want to wait,'” he said. “But not anymore.”
Not all the changes can be quantified. Rowe and other employees agree: Working for Escort Service just feels different. Before the string of attacks, working for the service did not feel like a job — it felt like a club, employees said.
The two dozen employees were a tightly-knit group. Everybody knew everybody else. Employees hung out after work. Although the group camaraderie still persists to some degree, the working environment, once casual, now feels more professional — and also more bureaucratic.
“The biggest change for me is that when I go in to work, I still don’t know people on the staff,” said Weinberg senior Britta McNair, who has worked for Escort Service since 2002 and has witnessed the service’s changes firsthand. The job was not so impersonal before, she said.
At the peak of the attacks against students, and when Escort Service was being overhauled in the fall and winter, McNair said she was uncertain about the way both employees and Banis were approaching the problems the service was facing.
But in hindsight, she said she largely agrees with the way the service has been revamped.
“During the strike there was a big focus on the wage change,” said McNair, who now makes $9 per hour compared to $7.50 in the fall. “I wanted the administration to realize we were unhappy with other things … Now that I look back on it, (the wage increase) brought a lot more people to the service when we really needed it most.”
The changes are for the better, Rowe said.
“I would be very surprised if we had another strike,” he said.
‘DOING NOTHING’
It’s about 9:20 p.m. on the same cold, drizzly Thursday night. Passengers shuffle in and out of the car. Weinberg junior Genevieve Bieniosek pulls the Escort Service car into the Sargent Hall parking lot. She puts the car in park and waits for a student outside the College of Cultural and Community Studies.
Bieniosek is about 10 minutes early. In the passenger seat, fifth-year Communication senior Jason Hones sits with a walkie-talkie in hand awaiting more orders from the dispatcher. After a few minutes pass, Bieniosek taps the horn.
“Tonight it’s pretty slow,” she said.
“It will pick up later once people start wanting rides to the bars,” Hones said.
Somewhere else in Evanston, four other cars could be carrying as many as a dozen other students. Or they, too, could be empty and waiting.
“A lot of nights, we sit around doing nothing,” Bieniosek later said. “It’s hardly ever more than a five-minute wait … it would be good to find a way to make us more flexible with the number of cars we have.”
With the bulk of the service’s improvements now complete, the service is running much more smoothly than during its rocky period at the beginning of the year, Hones said.
“Things have totally settled down,” he said.
Hones and Bieniosek are the longest-serving employees on Escort Service. They have seen a lot in their four and three years, respectively. But Bieniosek — and others too — wonder if the changes to Escort Service have been too drastic.
She offered several suggestions: Perhaps all five cars do not always need to be on the road. Perhaps employees should be sent home if it’s obvious they are not needed that night.
Escort Service’s changes over the past year have no doubt been costly, employees said. However, Banis and Andrew Hinderaker, the Student Escort Service administrator, declined to comment specifically on the service’s costs.
Bieniosek, who served as interim student coordinator for Escort Service late Fall Quarter, said the service needed to dip into a “supplementary budget” to accommodate the modifications.
Administrators still are crafting the service’s budget for next year, she said, adding that the service might be scaled back.
“We’re still going to have an Escort Service,” Bieniosek said. “It’s going to operate the same way. It’s just the scale we’re unsure of.”
NOT A TAXI SERVICE
Drivers’ least favorite part of the job is not the stream of drunken passengers or even the occasional confrontation. These hazards they can just “tune out,” Hones said. Most irksome, employees said, is that students don’t realize that Escort Service is strictly a safety service — not a taxi service.
“We don’t feel very good when a group of nine people call us to go to a bar,” said McCormick senior Steve Knapp, the service’s second student coordinator. “If you feel unsafe, call (Escort) — if you want a ride, call the shuttle.”
This problem reveals that in some respects the improvements to Escort Service have been a double-edged sword. Many passengers, like Weinberg sophomore Lacey Withington, who boarded Bieniosek’s car at about 9:40 p.m., have become “regulars.” Withington said the Escort Service picks her up at Delta Delta Delta at least four times per week so she can visit her boyfriend in Kemper Hall.
“I call while I’m getting ready, and by the time I’m ready, a car is there,” she said as Bieniosek’s car approached Kemper. Withington said she waited only five minutes for her ride that night.
Students like Withington find the service’s improvements worthwhile. But with students treating drivers like a free taxi service, is it possible that the Escort Service has be
come too good?
Maybe, Knapp said. One solution, he added, would be to educate students — perhaps during New Student Week — about the Escort Service’s role on campus. That could keep the service more focused and save money and resources, he said.
But such changes would come slowly. Escort Service now may be larger and faster. But as a consequence it’s also more bulky and bureaucratic, other employees said.
“What a lot of people don’t realize is that when you’re working with the administration,” Bieniosek said, “every step is a fight.”
