SCHOOLS AND TRAFFIC

If you were out and about early on Wednesday of last week, the chances are you were stuck in a major traffic jam. Yes, friends, schools opened in Knox County on that day, and for the next year most of us must acclimate ourselves to the travel woes that go with education. Plenty of things contribute to the inability to easily travel from Point A to Point B.

I’m all for growth and progress. Knoxville and Knox County are sprawling more each year. A drive in any area of the county will reveal how many subdivisions and apartment complexes are sprouting up. The problem with those developments is that they all dump traffic onto the roads. A recent survey indicates that the average household has 2.28 cars. So, even if a small development has 40 units, it unloads about 90 more vehicles on road surfaces.

Taking into consideration that most new developments are built on side roads, the problem grows even stickier. For instance, I live in the Ball Camp area. Every morning, a line of traffic backs up from the railroad track below the house and snakes its way up Ball Road in one direction and across another set of tracks on Ball Camp Pike. When a train comes each morning, the back-up makes sure that students are tardy to work, parents are late to work, and drivers lose their patience and tempers.

I attended a hearing on allowing a nearby development to proceed. One individual who would determine its fate answered a concern about inadequate roads by saying, “There are a lot of narrow roads i

n the county. That’s just something people have to deal with.” Really? Wouldn’t it make sense to develop the infrastructure before allowing hoards of new developments to begin?

Another factor causing traffic problems is parents. For some reason, moms and dads insist upon driving their children to school. They load up the kids and hit the roads. School zones are clogged like sink drains. Other vehicles trying to maneuver through the quagmire to reach other places are unable to move at all.

I passed the Cedar Bluff school zone just before students got out at noon on the first day. Even though schools wouldn’t end for about forty minutes, cars were lined up going both directions on Cedar Bluff Road. Even worse, some jerks had zipped down the line of waiting cars and then tried to cut

line. That blocked another lane of traffic. Don’t these people have better things to do than to sit in cars for long periods of time and snarl traffic?

Buses run throughout the county every morning of school. They stop to pick up students, and such frequent stops can back up traffic for a mile. The sad thing is that many of these big yellow limousines carry too few students. Parents won’t allow their children to ride buses. They believe that buses aren’t safe in so much traffic. Hey, if these folks would put their children on school transportation, the number of vehicles swamping roads and school zones would significantly decrease. Folks, tax dollars are paying the contracts for these buses. Not using them is a waste of money. Think about that the next time you have a conniption fit about how your tax dollars are spent.

Yes, school is back in session, and the traffic will be crazy. My suggestion is that any of you parents who can should put your children on buses that drive right to the schools. Of course, I know that’s not going to happen, so my best advice is that you all drive carefully, obey the traffic laws in school zones, and be patient. Summer will return a few months.