14 October 2019
Brandon Schrank – Freshmen, BI business major
I am not happy. In fact, I am infuriated. As UCCS students most of us have witnessed a campus vehicle driving on a pedestrian sidewalk at one point or another. Sometimes it is a police car, or a groundskeeper. Although it seems innocent enough, all of these vehicles have one thing in common; you do not realize they are there until they are right next to you. For most people this is not a problem, they see it pass them and move on with their day. But for me, all I could think about are the risks. “What if a person is walking with their headphones in and steps in front of the car as it drives by? That would be awful!”
Most often, people don’t really worry about this because those cars are going like five miles an hour. This makes sense considering most pedestrians struck by a slow-moving car live.
However, that does not mean they can’t get hurt. Think about this, you are walking back to the dorms after spending the past 5 hours in the library studying for that pesky mid-term.
Maybe you put some headphones in to dull the mental anguish, or maybe you just space out counting the lines on the sidewalk to distract from the pain. As you do this, you notice that you are walking slightly to the left, and before you know it, BAM! A campus vehicle was passing right as you realized that you were veering off course and accidentally runs into you. Now you have a broken femur and a foot that looks all out of whack.
If only there were some way to prevent this from happening. Personally, I have no problem with those cars driving on the sidewalks. In the case of the police, it makes it easier for them to respond to an incident and for all the other services like landscapers, mail trucks and dining trucks, it’s sensible because they have to use the sidewalks to get to their destinations.
The only thing that freaks me out is the possibility of someone getting hurt. I think that if they are going to use the sidewalks they should have a way to let people know that they are there.
At first, I thought of some sort of siren, but that would get pretty annoying and I feel like I would just throw myself into the cars path just to make it stop.
Then I thought something more subtle might work. For example, a low volume beep. It should not be super loud that the entire campus has to listen to it, but just loud enough that people around the vehicle can hear it.
I believe that having a way for people to know that the vehicle is there is a good measure to prevent an accident from occurring. So, I am pretty upset. Although lives may not be at risk here, femurs are, and we cannot risk that.