The road less traveled

While Bloomington during most of the year can aptly be described as a giant ball of energy flying toward the glass window of my sanity, summers are a lot different down here. Just a few days into the summer semester and I can already see the effects.\n Parking is more ample. Professors are better humored. There isn't a 20-minute wait to use exercise equipment or check e-mail on campus. Motionless barefoot college students, many of whom don't even have dreadlocks, lie dazed, lifeless, scattered across Dunn Meadow like Gettysburg.\nDid I mention there's actually parking available?\nBut paradise is not without realities. In addition to the Florida heat and Texas mosquitoes, one of Bloomington's major summer deficiencies is the road construction.\nI know, I know. It's a necessary part of maintaining the roads. But that's the point.\nIf you've driven down Woodlawn Avenue on campus lately, you know what I'm talking about. It was closed a few weeks back, baracaded off from Seventh to 10th Street in a massive University conspiracy to make me late to my statistics class.\nI'm not going to lie, except maybe in Dunn Meadow. I don't have a clue why Woodlawn was closed. Road construction, laying pipe, asbestos, squirrel removal, whatever. It doesn't change the fact that IU buses were flying down residential Bloomington streets at 7 a.m. every day.\nBut the road is worse now than when they started. The southbound lane between Eighth and Seventh Streets has the texture of a cheese grater and enough bumps to make the AM radio in my car skip. And even though the traffic skipped town for the summer, it's made driving down Woodlawn that much more infuriating.\nThis isn't an isolated incident of University oversight, if you can believe it. Last time they were doing construction on 10th Street, the crews left a ramp at the bottom of the hill in front of the Psychology Building big enough to host professional skateboarding events. After a year of constantly scraping my undercarriage, the barrage of motorists finally wore it down to a manageable thump.\nOf course, we'll see what lays in the wake of our University's most recent project on that road.\nSo while B-town is busy with the shutdown, I'd like to offer a few tips to our hippy-go-lucky summer residents.\nFirst, whatever you do, don't drive anywhere, at any time, for any reason. It might be convenient, sure, but if you use a road too much, we have to shut it down and make it uneven, maybe borderline dangerous to drive on. That way, people will go out of their way to avoid using it, and traffic volume on that road will decrease.\nAnd who says Purdue is the only engineering geniuses in this state?\nNow, go get yourself a nice pair of soft shoes. You're going to do a lot of walking, especially if you deliver pizza, and we can't have you crossing streets and adding unjust pressure to our fragile road system. The asphalt is cracking, the potholes are forming and you were going to cross the street in work boots? Some people just don't have any consideration for the rest of society.\nMaintaining our roads and highways is one of the most important functions for a working society. Without this infrastructure, IU buses wouldn't be able to fly through my neighborhood at 7 a.m., waking me in time to walk to class.