Around 10 p.m. on a Friday night, Stanford senior Jacqueline Becerra hopped into a 5-SURE van and was greeted by her driver and friend since frosh year, Joey Lariz. She buckled in and they headed to her destination – the Enchanted Broccoli Forest (EBF), an undergraduate theme house.

“I love 5-SURE. It makes me feel safe,” Becerra said, adding that she uses the free ride service about once a week. “It’s done wonders for me in terms of mobility and being able to go hang out with friends and get around such a big campus.”

During the ride, Becerra and Lariz caught up and shared a few laughs. At EBF, they said farewell and Lariz headed to Governor’s Corner to pick up his next passenger.

“Demand for this service is strong, especially among students,” said Lariz, who is a 5-SURE co-director. “On a typical Friday night, I can give well over 100 rides.”

Dispatches from the Farm

5-SURE – which stands for Students United for Risk Elimination – offers free rides seven days a week from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. to anyone with an active Stanford ID, including faculty, staff, and postdocs. Users can call 650-725-SURE (7873) and a dispatcher will request their SUNet ID number, location, and destination, then provide an estimated pickup time (last call is 1:45 a.m.).

Tiffany Cartagena is a coterminal master’s student and a 5-SURE co-director. She is also a 5-SURE dispatcher who works from an office in Rogers House. “Requests for rides are pretty steady, especially on the weekends,” she said. “When a call comes in, I take down the rider’s information and place it into a queue.”

With a walkie-talkie, she transmits a rider’s information to Lariz or another driver circling campus. Wait times can vary depending on demand and the distance a driver must travel. Large campus events, like football games, can also impact wait times.

5-SURE operates throughout the academic year, halting service during finals, summer, and Thanksgiving, winter, and spring breaks. The service takes riders anywhere on campus and three locations off campus: the Palo Alto Caltrain station after 9 p.m., the Oak Creek Apartments on Sand Hill Road, and the Stanford Shopping Center. Lariz said the spacious 5-SURE vans can seat several passengers at a time, as well as large cargo, like moving boxes.

“We try to accommodate everybody’s situation as much as we can,” said Lariz.

5-SURE is helpful when the Marguerite shuttle service ends at night, or when riders are traveling long distances or are unable to transport themselves due to an injury or other impairments. Although 5-SURE is a practical and reliable means of getting around campus, the safety it provides remains an important draw.

Similar services at other colleges and universities often operate under the auspices of campus law enforcement. But 5-SURE began as a student initiative at Stanford and it has thrived under that model.

Safe Stanford

The service, originally called SURE, for Students United for Rape Elimination, was created in 1979 following growing concern among students about campus safety. Founder Ron Lepow, ’80, was a junior at the time.

“I started thinking about solutions and came up with the idea for volunteers to serve as escorts with bikes that could get them around campus quickly,” Lepow said.

SURE was a grassroots effort, with Lepow recruiting trusted friends to volunteer as student escorts. It received support from the Office of Student Affairs and the Sheriff’s Department, which donated equipment, like flashlights and badges. Handheld cellphones did not exist, so escorts working two-hour shifts studied in their dorm rooms and waited for a dispatcher to call them on a landline to direct them to a caller’s location. The escort would arrive and walk or bike alongside the customer to their destination. Upon its launch, the service generated a considerable amount of interest among students.

“A busy night back in my day was 15 to 20 rides for all three escorts in one shift,” said Lepow, who is now retired from a family business in Louisiana.

SURE fell dormant for a period in the 1980s before relaunching in the 1990s as 5-SURE, which represented the landline call number 57873. In 2011 it upgraded its services with golf carts, cars, two-way radios, and paid student drivers. Today, 5-SURE’s safe rides service remains a student-led program, with co-directors Lariz and Cartagena leading its operations. In the rare event of emergencies, the Stanford Department of Public Safety provides support. 5-SURE is also professionally managed by the Office of Substance Use Programs Education & Resources (SUPER), as its mission was further defined to also prevent drunk driving. Demand is now higher than ever.

“Before COVID we were giving around 10,000 rides in an academic year. This year we will definitely surpass that number,” said Joe Kaczorowski, SUPER’s assistant director and program supervisor.

Ralph Castro is associate dean of students and director of SUPER. He said surveys also reflect 5-SURE’s popularity. “We did an assessment a few years ago and students rated it very highly,” he said. “They shared that it made them feel safer on campus and that they were very satisfied with the service.”

Nevertheless, SUPER continues to look for ways to improve the service. For example, SUPER’s staff are assessing how to improve and streamline the dispatch process, and they also hope to increase the number of vehicles to keep up with growing demand.

The 5-SURE brand has also expanded, adding a second upstander education program called 5-SURE on Foot, which provides safe walks home, snacks, and water, typically on the weekends in high-traffic party areas of campus.

Lepow said that when he created the service, he never imagined it would be around 45 years later. “I guess I hoped it wouldn’t be needed. But it didn’t occur to me then that it would expand in its uses, which I’m really happy about,” he said.

Caring for campus

Back in his 5-SURE van, Lariz dropped off another passenger outside of the Escondido Village Graduate Residences, which he said is one of the busiest areas of campus for 5-SURE drivers.

On his way to a frosh dorm, he recalled arriving at Stanford his first year and feeling concerned for his new classmates, many of whom were far from home for the first time in their lives. He said 5-SURE can help alleviate the anxiety that may come from being in a new environment – or anywhere.

“I definitely care very much about the campus and the well-being of people within the community,” he said. “And I really want to make sure that I’m doing something with my time here that feels meaningful.”