Stay on the side walk,  always hold an adult’s hand and obey traffic laws is what we all learned as children. Now that we’re in college, we don’t need anyone’s hand, but we still have to look both ways and stay on the side walk something many Stony Brook students   have forgotten.

Driving around campus, it’s pretty evident that some students assume cars will just stop automatically, like those automatic paper towel dispensers, so they just walk in the middle of the street despite the fact that a sidewalk is less than three feet away.

A place where this is extremely evident is in the humanities parking lot, behind the parking garage. Many students crossing from the social behavioral sciences to the main part of the academic mall, instead of using the crosswalk, enter the active driveway and continue walking in the middle of the road until the road ends and they are forced on to the sidewalk.

Standing on the sidewalk and just watching those students and  the looks on their faces as they’re in the middle of the road, it’s as if they think they’re walking on a playground with no regards to cars pulling in, out, and turning around.

Another issue I’ve seen around campus is complete disregard of traffic and crossing signals. If you see a red hand and an LED screen, it means don’t walk. You would think that if  students had the brains to get into SBU, they’d have enough common sense to know what that means, but everyday I see a handful of students ignoring these signs. Crossing signals were not installed to make the campus look pretty; they were installed for our safety.

I don’t care what town, what state or what country you are from. You may have been able to walk in the middle of the road and ignore signals there,  but you dont here at Stony Brook. It’s an accident waiting to happen, an accident that can be easily avoided. Students have to take responsibility and be aware of their surrounding areas when they are out and in a car.

We’re all familiar with that annoying traffic circle in front of Roth. If some people remember to actually ‘yield’ like the sign says and not  speed to the sign only to hit the brakes  at the last second the  traffic circle works pretty well. But on many occassions I have seen cars go too fast and/or ignore the yield sign, almost causing accidents. But, almost is almost right? Wrong. If you are one of those people who plow through the yield sign without looking, you’ve been lucky that the other driver is more competent than you. All it takes is for the other driver to be distracted for an iota of a second for  an accident to occur.

We’re lucky that not only do we have a state-of-the-art hospital on campus, but we also have an ambulance service whose members are properly trained, and respond within minutes.  So, in case there is an accident, you’re in the right place.  There shouldn’t have to be accidents.

Everyone from pedestrians to drivers have to obey the traffic laws. Maybe we need the campus police  to give out tickets for “jaywalking,” “speeding” and “failure to yield”?  Walking less than three feet over to a sidewalk won’t kill you, neither will leaving  a few minuets early so you don’t have to speed and run the sign. Ignoring  traffic laws will kill you.