Look both ways at preventing pollution

Infotainment by LUKE MORITZ

You walk across the street and you see lanes of cars on either side of you, stopped to let you go from one side to the other. You think to yourself how much the environment suffers from people driving cars to wherever they need to go and you smile because you are walking and helping the environment.

But are you really doing the environment a favor by walking to your destination? With current laws giving pedestrians the right of way on our streets, your walking could actually be doing more harm than good.

On each street you cross and crosswalk you traverse, there are numerous cars stopped, waiting for you to get to the other side of the street. Except for the new gas/electric hybrid cars, which shut off their engines when they come to a complete stop, each car is wastefully burning gas just because you decided to walk. These extra emissions, which could easily be avoided, are adding to the air quality issues we complain about every day.

The solution, I believe, is abolishing the right of way of pedestrians and giving this privilege to those in the vehicles on our streets.

If drivers were not required to stop every time someone needed to cross the street, they would not have to sit in their cars with the engines pumping out pollution.

This means, however, people would need to find their own way across the road. At first, this may prove difficult for some, but with practice, most people would be able to dodge the cars and trucks. Those who are not able to make it on their own will probably just have to drive.

Some people may argue with this because of the value of human lives. Critics will worry about pedestrians being hit while trying to cross the street. I say we need to seriously consider the value of all things involved. It only takes nine months to create a human life, but it takes millions of years to create fossil fuels.

The environment needs to be a priority within our society. One simple solution to cleaning up our air and to stop the stripping of our earth’s natural resources is changing our policy on right of way. Allowing vehicles to reach their destinations with as few stops as possible will help save the environment.

We need to start recognizing the importance of the environment and take every necessary action. The first step in this is granting vehicles the right of way. We should no longer allow pedestrians to worsen the already poor quality of our air. Of course, that is just my opinion.