Progress always comes at a price — it can often be a royally inconvenient pain in the butt. By now, you may have noticed such progress taking place around NSU — particularly out on Abe Fischler Boulevard/SW 30th St. on the north side of campus. The project has been underway for a couple of months now, making a short run to University Drive more interesting.
NSU Office of Facilities Management representatives say it’s a water-reclamation project undertaken by the city, so any frustration we get to experience as a result is all for a pretty good cause. But I have to worry a little about our commuter students, particularly all those med students who live just across the street from their college’s facilities and walk to and from school every day. The water project appears to have transformed what even under normal conditions can be a challenge for pedestrians into something more akin to a dodgeball game for our road weary students. Add to those perils all of the cross-street traffic along the drive, and conditions are quite ripe for danger and potential catastrophe.
As you make your way to school, by whatever means you do — on foot, bicycle, train, plane or automobile — please, please, please be careful on Abe Fischler Boulevard. That construction project out there is no joke. They’ve got steel pylons placed every few feet, narrowing the lanes so much that we can reach out our car windows and introduce ourselves to passing traffic. It’s also pretty difficult for motorists to enter traffic from a side street located right in the middle of the melee.
I wonder if we could move that Davie police “crossing guard,” who directed traffic last year at the west garage entrance on Abe Fischler, to a better post down the block so that she can protect our foot-traveling students as they make their sometimes heart-pounding crossing. At least for the time being, it seems that this would be good use of that particular resource. I’d really hate to learn that one of our students became a bug on a windshield simply because we’d misallocated a valuable resource — particularly if it’s my windshield.
