Editorial: Mobile app shouldn’t be pursued as the only solution without more data

Mobile apps can’t solve everything. And an undergraduate student government commission’s proposal to connect a late-night van service to students’ phones shows that technology can make problem-solving more complicated than it has to be, especially when there’s uncertainty about what the problem actually is.

Two weeks ago, Sandra Rhee, the Undergraduate Students Association Council Facilities commissioner, proposed integrating an app into the CSO evening van service. Rhee suggested this change because of her concern for campus safety, after being told that two students were mugged at gunpoint last spring while waiting for a van.

While anecdotal evidence is powerful, a single instance cannot effectively inform the commission or Community Service Officer administrators of the exact problem. While several students have said they have told individual CSO officers about long wait times for vans, Nancy Greenstein, a UCPD spokesperson, told The Bruin there haven’t been a significant number of official complaints to the police about the van service.

As such, both Rhee’s office and the UCPD need to collect more information from students to better understand the state of campus safety before trying enact supposed solutions. Doing otherwise could result in wasting resources on haphazard solutions that fail to address the underlying problems regarding campus safety.

Currently, the Facilities Commission’s proposal envisions a future where students will be able to log into the TapRide application on their phones, request CSO evening vans to their exact location and track how far away vans are until they arrive. Such an app would definitely be an asset to the CSO program, as students currently have to call the service to one of five locations on campus and in Westwood and wait 15 to 20 minutes for them to arrive. Some students have said they have even waited up to 40 minutes for a van to arrive or have had to wait longer after a van arrives because it is already full.

But jumping to the conclusion that connecting the service to an app is the necessary solution to the van service’s underlying problems requires a lot of assumptions – most prominently that CSO officials can safely divert money from another source and that these consumer upgrades will solve what is so far an unidentified problem.

Rhee told The Bruin she thinks funds for the application should come from the CSO escort program, which students can call to walk them home late at night, because the program isn’t used heavily. However, reducing or cutting a service to fund an application without knowing how costly would be unwise, especially before knowing how widely used the app would be.

Without solid data, the commission can’t be certain students want an application like this. And this wouldn’t be the first time USAC would have made the mistake of ignoring that fact. In 2014 for example, USAC raised between $10,000 to $15,000 to add UCLA to the Circle of Six U application. But between UCLA and the four other school systems serviced by the application, only a few thousand people have downloaded it and less than two dozen have rated or reviewed it on the App Store and Google Play as of Wednesday.

Until officials have better data, it’s also uncertain that being able to call a van to a specific place and see its progress will solve students’ wait times – in fact, without a set route and stops, service could become slower. Having to wait longer because vans are already filled doesn’t indicate a lack of efficiency, but resources.

This isn’t to say an app would never work. Greenstein told The Bruin that a mobile application is a long-term goal for the department. But without developers or any identifiable funding, it’s impractical to expect one anytime soon.

But there are other and most likely better solutions out there than a mobile application for improving students’ safety and well-being. The first step to finding them, however, is finding the problem.