Thoughtlessness Kills

Have you ever found yourself wanting to yell (or actually yelling) at a driver trying to switch lanes into the spot you were occupying? Or how about when a biker or a walker suddenly appears right in front of you as you are starting to make a turn? Or maybe you were that person and you were wondering how the driver didn't realize you were there? Those are events that happen to me all the time, and having spoken with many people at BYU- drivers, bikers, walkers, even long-boarders, it seems to be something that happens more than just frequently on or around campus. That is why I want to write my opinion editorial on what exactly is the underlying problem as to why traffic is so bad here, and hopefully touch a bit on what we can do to fix it.

Because my focus is on “what” the problem is, my editorial will be trying to answer the “What exists?” question above all else. The claim in my editorial answers that question by declaring, as I said, where the real problem lies, and I plan to use various sources as evidence to back up my claim. These include, but are not limited to, BYU student testimonials, and comparisons with similar historical situations, as well as some more recent events. I also plan to include various statistics and some recent well-known incidents in order to show that there really is a problem.

On top of providing these, shall we say, outside resources, I intend to make use of the events that I have witnessed over the past several months. As a student living in Wyview I have spent a rather large amount of time walking to and from campus daily (a good twenty minutes to half an hour, depending on the pace), as well as anywhere else I needed to get to. Add on top of that my habit of going on morning hikes all the way from Wyview up to the Y, and that racks up quite the sum of hours spent on the road watching traffic. In all those many hours, I have had many opportunities to see accidents and near accidents, and to discover what most often tended to be the cause of it. Is it usually the driver’s fault? Or is it almost always because the person walking was not where they should have been? Why do these events even occur? You’ll have to read my Opinion Editorial to find out (or just spend hours on ended walking the streets in Provo, watching for those incidents and examining them until you work it all out).