October 15, 2009
Are you parking across from BCC in the Regal Cinema’s lot? Are you using the crosswalks to cross the street? The answers are perhaps and probably not. Most of the students who park over there decide to jaywalk across Front Street. However, I suppose it would be more classified as playing a game of chicken with the cars. With Front Street being as busy as it is, there is no logical thinking to running across the four lanes.
“They want to get killed. The students literally want to die before they graduate. If they didn’t want to die, they wouldn’t do such a thing,” says frequent Front Street driver, Louis Goldman. “I drive through here every morning, and I could have killed half the campus with my car by now. Luckily, I am a cautious driver. I once saw one of the kids drop their books in the street running across. They stopped to pick them up with no regard that the traffic could potentially end their life.”
“It’s just so much easier to find a space over at Regal or Starbuck’s. I hate looking for a space on campus,” says a Broome Community College student who always parks at Regal. “As for running across the road, I guess there really isn’t a reason for it. Maybe it’s just the adrenaline rush.”
The main question here is why would the students find the better option to dart across the street in front of the paths of cars when there are crosswalks at both sides of the campus- only a few feet from where they are doing this? Maybe it is because of the fact that they hate waiting on the crosswalk signal to light up and that the people driving are practically running pedestrians over in the crosswalk anyway, so they see no point in crossing in the designated areas.
In Boston, Massachusetts all traffic signals turn red when the crosswalk signal is lit. We may not be a big enough or busy enough city to do such a thing, but in high-traffic areas and especially in front of a busy commuting college, that should be law. Even when the sign does say that you are allowed to cross the street, the cars that are also allowed to go at the same time get very annoyed if you are doing anything less than running.
No comments:
Post a Comment