THE INFINITE traffic light at the Cavalier Inn. The jagged, hairpin curve on Wertland Street behind the Corner. The blind, awkward maneuver required to get onto Route 29 from the ramp coming down McCormick Road. All over Grounds, bad road design stands out worse than if a gorilla were walking around Cabell Hall. It strains drivers, creates deathtraps for pedestrians, and becomes a nuisance for hurried students.
Yet roads are as engrained into our University life as the sky or the Rotunda, compounding the problem because we're left helpless in the face of it.
No one is blaming the bad road design for the excessive traffic, since that's just a function of the growing University driver population. And it's understood there is little that can be done to widen Route 29 when it's lined to its brim with Red Lobsters and Holiday Inns. Instead, all we can do is laugh at some of the streets and crosswalks on Grounds, because their layouts are so bad that it's almost funny. But not only are these driving areas laughable, they also are dangerous.
Let's start with the treacherous interchange that's also known as "the crosswalk at Woodrow Apartments." The island across the street from it might seem like an oasis wedged between Emmet Street and Stadium Road. Yet walking from the apartments onto Central Grounds is like playing a dangerous game of Frogger. Whose idea was it to let two roads converge with a mere yield sign to direct drivers, offering only an onslaught of speeding traffic to helpless pedestrians who must finally muster up the courage to say a prayer and jaywalk?
Maybe it was the same person who thought it would be a good idea to situate a traffic light in such a way that it's placed at an exact diagonal to the driver's view. This is the clever scheme that's in place at the intersection of University Avenue and JPA, where drivers must twist their cars like pretzels in order to make a turn. Maybe this person also came up with the impossibly tight 90 degree twist needed to turn onto McCormick Road from University Avenue near Alderman Library and the chapel.
In all fairness, it's not one person who decides the fate of our on-Grounds roads but a combination of the Virginia Department of Transportation, University Grounds maintenance and the Charlottesville City Council. But with all these groups putting their heads together to develop Charlottesville's roads, one would think that more attention would be paid to safety.
"The best engineering decisions aren't always the most feasible decisions," said Professor Micheal Demestsky, Director of the Center for Transportation and a Civil Engineering professor. "It's a very complex political mix - VDOT's in the business of moving traffic and City Council has goals like less automobile use or safe bike paths like along Emmett Street, near the Newcomb parking garage."
Perhaps the problem begins when there is only one road running through the entire Grounds. Route 29 is like a country road gone terribly wrong, a highway that quaintly whirs past picturesque pastures en route to the University but then arrives in town only to bear the brutal brunt of on-Grounds driving.
For the SUV driver, its narrow lanes are hard to drive in and even harder to turn onto. Charlottesville might hold places like Northern Virginia in contempt since road expansion proceeds there at exponential rates, but the irony of Charlottesville's status as a supposedly "country" town is that right now it's getting as saturated with roads as the D.C. area, and even the bypass onto Meadowcreek Parkway that was approved months ago still hasn't been constructed. The city of Charlottesville needs to put road construction and saftey at the forefront of its priorities.
There are inconveniences in Charlottesville that can make living a hassle. From the frustration involved with renting a movie on a Saturday night at Blockbuster, where the line is longer than the unemployment queue during the Great Depression, to the suspicious food quality that riddles basic chains like Burger King and Taco Bell, these are minor inconveniences that we can overcome.
Overall, Charlottesville really is a nice place to attend college, or at least it could be much worse. On the other hand, when fundamental necessities like safe, organized roads can't be provided to the University, it makes you wonder what other problems there are that could be remedied with a little attention.
(Diya Gullapalli is a Cavalier Daily associate editor.)
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