By [email protected]

Everyone on this campus should have the right to safe roadways and sidewalks. But they don’t. While the University addresses problems with smoking in dorms and in front of buildings, it ignores one of the greatest menaces facing college kids in the country: the dangers of secondhand driving. Drivers seem to feel that it’s their personal right, as if it were a civil liberty, to drive wherever they like, but driving in public causes much death and destruction in this country. Driving kills around 42,000 people each year, but unlike smoking, it also injures far more, sometimes crippling people. And we worry about smoking? The University should consider banning all sorts of these automobiles from within 20 feet of any building in the University. How would you like to be walking out of your dorm only to be a victim of secondhand driving by a Hummer? Drivers who linger near buildings force people entering or exiting to look both ways and slow down, aside from threatening their mere existence. Limiting, if not eliminating driving on campus is a matter of public safety and it’s an embarrassment that the school has allowed it for so long. It should be a public safety initiative to ban driving within 20 feet from the entrance to any building and to enforce these rules. Drivers do not have the right to endanger the lives of others. It’s that simple.