Midway travel question

HydeSnark
Fri, 09 Sep 2016 06:36:03 +0000

The comment on New City was a bit silly but it is true that as you go north it gets safer with more blocks that aren’t complete pits of poverty, drugs, and despair. 63rd to 71st is the worst, 63rd to Garfield is better, and Garfield to 47th is even better. It’s hard to notice the difference looking at a shooting map that abstracts out all the detail, but on the ground it’s more obvious. If you had to choose a random block to get off in Englewood basically all of the Garfield and 63rd blocks at daylight are fine. There are some on the side that I would not go down at any hour by myself, and there are more of those blocks as you go south.

West Woodlawn (statistics are diluted by the rest of Woodlawn, which has Hyde Park levels of safety) and Washington Park (very low population density makes it look better) are just as bad/worse as Englewood, and tourists wonder into those on foot all the time and the worse thing that happens is occasionally someone gets mugged. The gun violence Chicago is infamous for is staggeringly unlikely to affect people who don’t live in the affected areas, even if they wander in.

The article about crime on the CTA found Addison as the most dangerous stop on the L. Y’know, that derelict stop in the middle of the terrifying south side…no, wait, it’s 100 feet from freaking Wrigley Field in one of the safest community areas in the city. If your bar for safety is so high that you think taking the CTA from Midway to UChicago is too dangerous, you probably won’t feel safe on the CTA at all. Some people are like that, that’s fine (uber exists!). But the CTA between Midway and UChicago isn’t any worse than the CTA anywhere else.

Btw, Garfield Red Line isn’t so bad. That article pegged it as a bad stop, not as the most dangerous. 47th Red Line is worse imo. It has the same design but with less people around in a worse neighborhood. Garfield has a bad design but it’s crowded enough (almost always with a few UofC people) that there are usually people around even until midnight. Later than that it’s very iffy and you have to worry about things happening, but luckily the 6 runs until 1.