Were I a parent in my neighborhood on 13th St. right now, I think I could do a pretty adequate job of keeping my kids entertained during the day. Just look at all that awesome construction equipment lining the side of College Ave! I know I always liked playing with toy trucks or jumping around in sandboxes when I was a kid, and luckily, less than a football field away from my window, dump trucks and backhoes alike freely roam the streets. What, I ask, can be more fun than running around life-sized toys at a real-life construction site? (Note: I do not condone allowing children to really play with or on working construction machinery unsupervised.)
To this I have an answer: not having to set your alarm to go off before your first class. Is this response unexpected? It shouldn’t be. As a privileged member of the community, I felt graced with the sweet sounds of steel support beams being driven into the unyielding earth at a rate of about one inch every two seconds. It was to this that at around 7 am, though earlier if I was lucky, I would awake in the morning, ready to start the day. Sadly, the pile drivers have all but ceased, and their melodies are but a memory of perfectly acoustic echoes between the Science Center and the Cogswell labs.
But I did not write this to thank the construction efforts, unfortunately. All sarcasm aside, I don’t see the need for the creation of the parking garage next to Cogswell Lab. Granted, the existing parking lot may not have been large enough to accommodate the increased parking requirements that would follow the completion of the new biotech building, and it is too late for an opinion such as this to matter much, so I offer a suggestion for the future. The soon-to-be pavement playground, the air and noise pollution accompanying it, and the increased area traffic that will soon follow its completion could be mostly eliminated by the policy enstated at the beginning of this past school year, which drastically the number of freshman who can have cars on campus.
Policies like this are in effect at many other colleges throughout the nation and have many benefits. First, environmental improvments come as reduced gas consumption, and reduced pollution in general, to name a few. Secondly, the social atmosphere will benefit, effectively increasing the opportunity for first year students to be outside and interact with a wider variety of students, rather than rely on closed, mechanistic means to navigate the area. Until such construction is no longer necessary, I suggest the RPI Pep Band incorporate the currently lonely pile driver into their percussion section.
