Troy’s City Council recently passed a law banning students under age 18 from loitering within 2,000 feet of a school between 7 am and 4 pm. School administrators say that the law will reduce fighting and city leaders also say it should help traffic flow. As RPI students, we worry that instead of solving problems, this new law will only cause more.
Under the new law, Troy students can no longer loiter across the street from their school located just off RPI property. In order to hang out with friends, they will have to be 2,000 feet away from the school, perhaps pushing the loitering place closer to or directly onto RPI property. Troy High students have already been seen congregating near Davison and Sharp Halls and this new law will only give them more motivation to move farther from their school and closer to ours.
This new law doesn’t solve the problems of fighting and traffic congestion; it only moves them. Now, instead of fights breaking out across from the school where school security can respond, it could happen on RPI property or elsewhere. School security may not be able to stop fights in progress if they do not know where they are occurring. Similarly, while it may be easier for motorists to travel on the road directly in front of the school, students will only find other places to congregate and thus traffic will bottleneck at these new locations, perhaps making it harder to leave RPI parking areas.
While the ideas behind this new law are good, the implementation is not a good one. The new law probably will not alleviate traffic jams or reduce fighting; it will just change the locations where these problems occur.
