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Vol. LXV, No. 27
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Wednesday, July 6, 2011
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Vol. LXV, No. 27
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Wednesday, July 6, 2011
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Richard Rosolino
Walnut Lane
To the Editor
I would like to follow-up on Ira Polly’s letter of June 29 (“Crosswalk Perils: Lives Are At Risk”) addressing the perils of pedestrian crosswalks. I am also a longtime resident of Princeton who for the past 15 years has been a full-time pedestrian. I do not own a car, I live near the shopping center and work just off Nassau Street. I walk to work every day and home for lunch, thus crossing Nassau and Hamilton four times each. I walk to the shopping center, to the Library and 40 minutes to the Dinky (soon to be 460 feet further from my home). Regardless of what the Police, the Borough, the Township or the NJ DOT may say, walking the streets of Princeton is dangerous at best, deadly at worst. I observe poor driving each and every day including drivers endangering other drivers and even more so endangering pedestrians. I have been forced to adopt a very defensive approach to walking, which often includes crossing streets mid-block, away from dangerous intersections like Hamilton and Moore or Chestnut. At least mid-block a pedestrian can choose when to cross and has to look only two ways and not four. This also avoids the extremely dangerous situation of finding yourself standing in the middle of a busy intersection because a driver in one direction stopped to allow you to cross while those in the other directions whiz by you.
Our local governments can spend all the money they want “improving” crosswalks, but until they start ticketing drivers for not yielding to pedestrians, this situation will never change. They may petition the NJ DOT to improve crosswalks on Route 206, a road I rarely cross on foot, but they also need to realize these problems exist throughout Princeton, including Nassau Street. It might takes years of constant enforcement and ticketing to change peoples’ poor driving habits but think how much revenue might be collected during this enlightened endeavor. It also may be a good way to shift some of the tax burden from homeowners to “bad drivers.”
Richard Rosolino
Walnut Lane