When you’re a pedestrian on ASU’s campuses, bicyclists and longboarders become the bane of your existence, frustratingly zooming by you with no regard for your personal safety and without any sense of decorum.
And when you’re the one with wheels, it’s pedestrians who walk without purpose: they’re clearly there solely to disturb your path on the way to class.
Either way, and particularly on the Tempe campus, the human traffic congestion on the malls is nearly as bad as trying to drive your car down University Drive at 5 p.m. (Which, by the way, also coincides with your extreme jealousy of bikers and walkers, who are blissfully unconfined by red lights and lane-hogging buses.)
In a very depressing comparison, the foot traffic at ASU is akin to Disneyland — tens of thousands of people crowd the walkways every day. Sadly, the destination at the end of the walk is not Space Mountain or Indiana Jones, it’s Astronomy 101 or Introduction to Anthropology. Or in the worst of cases, Statistics of Life Sciences.
But the point is that Disneyland has learned the value of crowd control, and since a State Press editor had the misfortune of being hit by a longboarder outside Lattie F. Coor Hall Monday (something that happens to the average ASU student far too frequently), we are reminded of this issue, which, in all seriousness, is a hazardous situation for everyone on campus.
On a less serious note, it’d be cool if ASU took several pages out of Disneyland’s book besides crowd control — a “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride would be a nice way to cool down after September classes.
Maybe adding rides to the campuses isn’t necessarily the best way to go, but what about the addition of bike lanes on the malls?
Over spring break, Lot 59 East and several other parking lots were repaved and the spaces were repainted. How hard would it be to paint some lanes onto the ASU malls?
Construction is always happening around ASU, and if a project to add bike lanes would make a real difference, it should be more of a priority. Another solution would be for bicyclists and longboarders to actually heed the “dismount zones” in the busiest parts of campus, but let’s not plan on a miracle.
Right now, the already strained relationship between students on foot and students on wheels is reaching the breaking point — quite frankly, this campus ain’t big enough for the both of us.
But since banning bikes is impossible, and banning walking won’t really do any good either, these two groups are going to have to find a way to coexist.
And in this case, ASU officials actually have the ability to make a change without having to spend several hundreds of millions of dollars — it’ll only take some time and some paint.
