I strongly believe in the benefit of public transport for everyone and I also believe people should walk more and drive less, both due to personal health and environmental reasons.
I am in no position to give advice, make judgments or attempt to change anyone’s view on life, but I think students should really think twice before getting in a car just to drive from the library to South or from North to the Walgreens in Lake Forest, especially on a beautiful, sunny day.
A lot of Lake Forest College students choose to have or not have cars for various reasons. “Cars are always useful,” Binam Bajracharya ’19 said, but he thinks having a car would be more useful if campus was closer to Chicago. “There is nowhere much to go,” he added.
Sara Jankovic ’18 prefers to use Metra, she said, because having a car on campus is expensive for an international student. She agrees that “for people who need it for commuting, it’s a viable option.”
Upperclassmen do indeed have priority when it comes to having a car parked on campus, but it is not as if freshmen are completely forbidden to have cars. If a freshman provides a valid reason as to why they need a car, they will be allowed to have it; an example of a “valid reason” would be the necessity of driving to appointments that are scheduled at regular intervals.
I think either everyone should be subjected to the same control and asked to provide reasons for why they need a car, or no one should be asked.
In my opinion the best solution would be for cars to be forbidden for everyone, but this isn’t a realistic solution since a large portion of our students commute. The most feasible thing to do would be a stricter screening of those who own cars.
Since this is a campus full of students and the consumption of various substances that impair thinking isn’t exactly a rare occurrence, we need to consider all the amount of driving that happens under those conditions, the risk of unwanted accidents and the danger this poses to students’ lives.
In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have cars. In the current world, it would be great if we could at least have fewer cars and drive less.
