UWM B.O.S.S. Service Needs to Meet Expectations

It’s about 12:50 a.m. at the UWM Golda Meir Library. You’ve had a long day of class and live a significant distance from campus. You’ve been swamped with homework spend your evening at the library. However, your eyes starting to burn and your brain are turning to mush. You figure it’s a good time to call it a night and call a B.O.S.S ride home.

You open up Tap Ride and begin packing up as you wait for a driver to accept your ride home. Mere minutes later, your ride is already outside, and you frantically gather your things in hopes of not being left. You make it to your ride, and, once inside, your driver asks for your student ID. As you get your wits you reach into your pockets and to your dismay, your ID is not there. Instead of breaking their rules, the driver asks for you to leave the vehicle. A rush of frustration overcomes you because your other options of getting home like an Uber or a phoning a friend are out of the question. You must walk home. This is, unfortunately, one of many familiar situations UWM students who use B.O.S.S.

UWM B.O.S.S. “Be on the Safe Side” is one of the university’sies safety services. B.O.S.S. non-emergency transportation safety service is designed to provide a safe ride around the UWM Campus. In the past few years, B.O.S.S has changed a few of its regulations. They no longer made it a requirement to bring your local bus pass for identification. They also increased the number of guests allotted per rider and even added the TapRide app to make ride scheduling more accessible.

Our segregated fees also fund the UWM B.O.S.S. service. Segregated fees are designated fees within our tuition to help pay for campus services and programs. However, no matter the revisions UWM students are still being denied a safety service, which they have paid for because they don’t have their students’ IDs. This, in fact, leaves them in positions where they aren’t safe. As a student who lives off campus, the only reason I use my student ID is to get into the library and even there if I forget I can give them my student ID number or normal ID to grant access. They don’t just turn me away and say study somewhere else. What sense does that make?

To add fuel to the fire, there are four different ways to order a ride from B.O.S.S., and, of those four, three of them require validate your status as a UWM student. The only one that doesn’t is a ride via phone call. For students to even use the app TapRide, they must have a student username/email and password to have access to any university’s ride services. So before you can even order a ride, you have to confirm your student status and identification.

You would imagine that your airport security briefing for your ride home would continue once inside the vehicle, but instead, it is a simple glance that dictates your safety. You could wave a yellow piece of paper around and possibly manage a ride home. The drivers aren’t even being safe. There is no double check or swipe or scan, to even confirm your who you say you are. Ideally, you could’ve stolen someone’s ID, flash it and receive the ride home. This process inside seems infuriating considering that you can be turned away for not having an ID when you needed that information to order one in the first place.

So then is B.O.S.S really keeping us on the safe side? If no one has told you, Milwaukee isn’t the safest city. Within the last two months, there have been more than five armed robberies with three occurring in the same day while other reported by the Milwaukee police department occurred within five blocks of campus. These are the only reports shared through school services via email and the campus safety website. This doesn’t account for sexual assaults, car theft, or any other type of theft and harassment. I would rather take a ride home than freezing on an awkward walk home with a safe walker or trying to locate and then sprint to a little blue light in the midst of danger.

Students who are using this service like the above scenario are using their resources. They are doing what is asked of them to be safe but to deny their non-emergency request is easily subjecting them to a real emergency. Students are required to adhere to a set of requirements to ensure their safety. It is not meeting its expectations and therefore can leave students unsafe who believe it is reliable service for being safe. Until there is a better way to ensure that the safety of those providing the service and the students using it are equally safe, UWM BOSS should change their its name.