The other day while walking back from one of my afternoon classes, I was causally listening to my iPod and decided to cross the Boulevard to get to the other side where my dorm is. Now given that the Boulevard is a one way of street, I glanced down the street to see if any immediate cars were coming as I approached the crosswalk. One car seemed a reasonable distance off but I figured they must see that I was stepping into the street and would do the reasonable thing and slow down. Sadly, this was a bad assumption on my part. The driver, who happened to be texting at the time, looked up and stopped the car quickly, and while it was not one of those cliché TV stops where they drop their phone, slam on the breaks, and skid for a good 15 feet, the car still jerked slightly from breaking so quickly. After looking down for a brief second, the driver made eye contact with me and the girl actually had the tenacity to flip me off.

While I do think that driving etiquette would make a very interesting topic for an article, that isn’t what the problem is. The problem is that SMU students are not the best drivers in the world. The reality is that just because you drive a nice Audi or Mercedes does not mean you have the right to run me down. So sit down and buckle up because we are about to take a quick trip to find out why this is a problem and how we can fix it, at least so no more iPod-car incidents almost come to pass.

Now I was not completely innocent in this situation, I want to clarify that. I should have seen that the girl was texting and had not looked up for a good five seconds, and logic would dictate that I not step into the road. My bad. But at the same time this is a perfect example of how we have become so leinent on the rules of the road that we forget all the technical rules. While I am not advocating that people need to memorize that silly yellow book we all had to read while taking drivers ed, I do want to stress just how far from the rules we have strayed.

Take for example the intersection between Dyer Street and the street that runs in front of Boaz, at the corner the construction site of the new parking garage. There is a very odd three-way stop. Now basic rules of driving 101 states to pull up to the sign, stop and then go. If others are at the stop, the person to your right, or whoever got there first, goes first. As simple as this may seem, many people forget it, making that intersection an accident waiting to happen. Many times I will pull up, stop, then proceed to go only to be surprised that the car adjacent to me thought it had the right of way and just blazed through the stop sign, only to honk at me when our cars almost hit. This whole mentality that you have the right of way no matter what has got to go.

Another prevalent problem comes in the form of turn signals. I mean, why should we use them when it is such an inconvenience to move your hand the full six inches to flip the switch to turn it on? What were the makers of the modern day auto thinking? The fact of the matter the turn signal is important for letting other drivers, and pedestrians, know where you are going. Twice this year I have seen cars pull up to stop signs without a blinker on, and honk at pedestrians when the car has to stop half way through the intersection because the pedestrian assumed the car was going straight. Think of it this way: if you don’t turn on your blinker you will have to honk your horn at some confused pedestrian, which means you will have to move your hand six inches to the horn. Need I say more?

Many people will say that the longer you drive the better a driver you become, but I would find that I strongly disagree with this statement. What I have come to find is the longer you drive, the more comfortable you become with it, which doesn’t necessarily make you better. In fact, in a way its spells disaster. The older and more confident we become, the more we begin to stray from the rules of the road because we feel that we already know them. We begin to do things such as mess with CD’s or the radio, talk or text on our cell phones, or even look away from the road to talk to the person next to us. If you think back to the first time you got in a car you would remember that you were probably so nervous that you kept your eyes on the road, made a complete stop at every stoplight and always turned on your blinker when turning.

So despite how treacherous walking may be here at SMU, I have complete faith that at least some will read this article and change their driving habbits. And if not, well, they make pedestrian airbags, right?

About the writer:

James Lucente is a first-year double major in international relations and broadcast journalism. He can be reached at [email protected].