Traffic woes — 09/08/09 » Editorials » Daily Independent (Ashland, KY)

Editorials

Discussion

September 5, 2009

Traffic woes — 09/08/09

Many adults could learn from example of Verity students

Anonymous The Daily Independent Sat Sep 05, 2009, 06:50 AM EDT

Many adults who address the Ashland Board of City Commissioners and other public bodies could learn a lot from a group of seventh-graders at George M. Verity Middle School. Instead of simply expressing their views with little or nothing to support them, the students from Verity’s seventh-grade Discovery Team addressed the city’s governing body armed with facts to support their opinions.

Their opinion: The traffic signal at 29th and Kansas streets — the main entrance to the middle school — is dangerous because too many drivers are ignoring the law.

To support their view, students observed traffic at the intersection during the busiest times of the day just before school in the morning and just after school in the afternoon. What they observed were inattentive drivers talking on their cell phones; drivers turning right on red despite clearly visible signs saying “No turn on red;” and some drivers simply failing to stop for the red light.

Casey Clark, whose father is an officer for the Ashland Police Department, said he and his classmates counted more than 100 motorists violating traffic laws. “A lot of people who were running it (the signal) were on their cell phones, looking at their cell phones, texting, not paying a lick of attention to what they were doing,” he said.

“It’s a really dangerous place,” Noah Edison, 12, said earlier in the afternoon at Verity. “It really kind of scares me. Not only do I fear for other students but I fear for myself. ... When we cross that road you really have to be aware or you can get hit.”

In addition to providing a few facts to support their opinions, the students offered their own solution to the problem: change the traffic light at the intersection to a permanent stop light to get motorists to obey it.

While we commend the students for their civic involvement and their research to support their opinions, we disagree with their solution. We think there are other, less drastic ways to solve the traffic problem around the school. If the APD would assign an officer to monitor the intersection during peak times and that officer would issue citations — or at least warnings — to those who violate the law, we think the traffic problems would largely disappear within a matter of days.

Traffic signals serve at least two useful purposes. One is to increase safety. The other is to facilitate the smooth flow of traffic. Having the traffic signal operate 24 hours a day may make the intersection safer, but it would needlessly slow the flow of traffic during the hours when students and buses are not clogging Kansas Street.

In fact, except during the hours immediately before and after school, there is not need for a traffic signal at the intersection. That’s because the vast majority of the traffic is on 29th Street, not Kansas and the other nearby side streets. Motorists can easily and safely pull onto 29th Street from a side street without the assistance of a traffic signal.

The light at 29th and Kansas serves the identical purpose of another traffic signal on Beech and Floyd streets near the entrance to Paul G. Blazer High School. That signal also only is fully operational before and after school and flashes the remainder of the time.

We know from experience that if you are not paying close enough attention, it is easy to run a traffic signal that is flashing most of the time. But if you are not paying enough attention to stop for a red light in a school zone at 10 minutes to 8 in the morning, you probably are not going to stop for it at 1 p.m. or 1 a.m.

Increased enforcement during peak periods is the best response to the safety hazard the students so ably pointed out with their research.

Text Only

Editorials

Charles Chattin
Before it merged with Ashland Community College to form Ashland Community and Technical College as a result of the 1997 Higher Education Reform Act, the Ashland Area Vocational-Technical School compiled an impressive record for teaching job skills to young adults and placing more than 85 percent in jobs for which they were trained.

February 10, 2012
Try again
It is time for Kentucky Speaker of the House Greg Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, and Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville, to cease playing political games and redraw district lines that are compact and are based far more on population changes during the first decade of this century than on partisan politics.

February 9, 2012
'Asset poor'
More than one in four Kentucky households are “asset poor,” meaning that they are living from paycheck to paycheck with little or no financial cushion to fall back on should they suddenly lose their jobs or have another emergency resulting in a temporary loss of or delcine in income.

February 7, 2012
Safer mines
The head of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) says coal operators throughout the country are improving their operations and, as a result, mines are becoming safer. However, MSHA chief Joe Main said too many coal operators still “don’t get it” and are continuing to cut costs by ignoring safety. That’s why MSHA plans to continue targeting mines with a history of repeated violations for additional inspections.

February 7, 2012
Not far enough
For the past three sessions of the Kentucky General Assembly, bills that would raise the minimum dropout age from 16 to 18 have been approved by the Kentucky House of Representatives by wide bipartisan margins only to die in the Senate without even a vote.
Now the Senate Education Committee has unanimously approved a dropout bill hailed as an alternative to the House bill, but it does not go nearly far enough. It is a halfway measure that would have only a limited effect on preventing teenagers from quitting high school before graduation and virtually assuring themselves of lives on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.

February 6, 2012
Not their job
The local government committee of the Kentucky House of Representatives has wisely killed a bill — dubbed “Cooper’s Law” — that would have allowed the family of the Lexington toddler with cerebral palsy to have a playhouse on their property despite a deed restriction that apparently prohibits such structures.

February 6, 2012
Keeping FADE
Despite an increase in cost to the department, Carter County Sheriff Casey Brammell told the Carter County Fiscal Court that his department will continue to be active in the FIVCO Area Development Drug Enforcement (FADE) Task Force — at least for now.

February 4, 2012
Needed changes
The soaring enrollment that Kentucky’s community and technical colleges have experienced in recent years could come to a sudden end — or at least be slowed — as about 5,500 students in the statewide system that includes Ashalnd Community and Technical College are expected to lose their financial aid under new rules being implemented by the federal government.

February 3, 2012
Released early
While it is disappointing that 75 of the 952 prisoners granted early release in January have violated the terms of their releases, the good news is that none of the former inmates have been charged with new felonies. That’s an early, but positive, indication that the nonviolent felons released before their sentences were up have been carefully selected and are among those least likely to return to a life of crime.

February 2, 2012
Obese children
Almost a decade after former Gov. Ernie Fletcher called childhood obesity an “epidemic” in Kentucky, a majority of Kentucky adults still think that there are too many overweight children in the state and they place the bulk of the blame squarely on the shoulders of their parents.

February 1, 2012
More Editorials Headlines

Editorials

Search Results

Discussion

Traffic woes — 09/08/09

Many adults could learn from example of Verity students

Site Map

Contact Us