Student on the Street: A Short Report on Campus Traffic Etiquette
Traffic on Broadway can be beautiful you just have to look really, really hard.
An estimated 20,000 students and upwards of 400 faculty members make their way through EvCC campus each year.
Most of these people drive cars, poorly…
Let’s say that 70% of the 20,400 people who spend time on campus, drive here in a Prius (an average weighing car). A 2012 Toyota Prius weighs 3,042 pounds. That is 43,439,760 pounds of metal, plastic and bumper sticker. This figure doesn’t even include the weight of all the humans driving them.
Now let’s make 70% of them try to find a parking space between 8:00-10:00am while hopped up on quadruple-shot-extra-sugar vanilla-soy-gingerbread-pumpkin-raspberry Latte. Armed with a parking pass and a sense of entitlement, motorists are truly magnificent creatures.
“What’s a pedestrian? Someone who better get outta muh way! -Guy driving his car
For a timed five minute period I observed the three-way intersection entering the campus, located near Whitehorse. In five minutes there were 62 cars that passed through the intersection. Most rolled through the stop signs, but 20 people blatantly ran through the stop signs, there were two near accidents between motorists, and one pedestrian was almost hit. In five minutes.
Marc Tolle, the head of security, has been at EvCC for 26 years. In his time here only four car-pedestrian accidents have occurred, with no fatalities and some bad injuries. Where the unbelievable numbers come in, is people’s inability to follow parking guidelines. In the last 26 years, an average of 5,000 yellow reminder cards and 3,000 actual parking tickets are given each year.
EvCC student Abdul Karim accounts for a few of those tickets “I have trouble with the tickets. My class starts at 8:50, but I can only park until 9:50. And my class gets out at… 9:50” Been there. It’s no secret that the outlying neighborhoods hate our studious guts. I’ve personally seen crudely constructed parking deterrents, trash cans with warnings spray painted on them, or even elderly women armed with gardening tools shooing off a would-be parker.
This holiday season let us rise above the Black Friday commuters and behave behind the wheel like the educated folks that we are. Come to a complete stop, use crosswalks and don’t park like a jerk or you’ll be on the naughty list. Now I gotta run because I’m parked in front of the elementary school.
