Editorial: On Encouraging Alternative Transportation
We do need to find alternatives to fossil fueled based transportation, but we cannot sacrifice safety in the process. A friend of mine just had a close call today with a bicyclist riding his bike inside of Clark Hall. My friend said, "that was scary."
If the university wants to encourage alternative transportation there are things that can be done, inexpensively like providing shower facilities to faculty and staff who ride their bikes to work.
In the short run, turning the campus into a free-for-all for bicyclists, skateboard riders and people using razors may seem like a cheap way to encourage alternative transportation, but that is not the case. Just wait until the first crash, until the first person gets hurt real bad and or killed and then sues the university. The university cannot plead ignorance. They have been warned. The staff employees union has filed a health and safety grievance and has provided the university with plenty of evidence about the hazardous conditions here. The entire campus is a job site for the people who work here and the university, under labor law, has a legal and a contractual obligation to provide a safe work place.
It is time for the university to stop taking the cheap way out and to get serious about encouraging alternative transportation. No solution that endangers the employees of the university (as well as other campus community members) is acceptable. No union can sit still when the safety of the members it represents is at risk.
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