By: Xander Gallup, News Editor
Anyone who’s ever gone to Southview knows three essential things: the bathroom sinks don’t work half the time, the homeroom activities are corny, and the intersections are absolutely horrendous.
There’s no sugar-coating it. Southview doesn’t have very good intersections. Intersections are hard to build with proper traffic flow, but they’re almost impossible to nearly stop traffic entirely. Anyone who knows what I’m about to talk about, just strap in because it’s a rabbit hole.
There’s only one intersection in the school that does its job worse than any of the others. That intersection is the World Language-Social Studies Intersection. Lines span entire hallways full of students trying to get through. There’s no order, no one cares about anyone else in the intersection, and worst of all is that it’s actually scary when thinking about the hazards.
With how many students pass through the intersection at a time, one trip and someone could easily be severely trampled. One sick person in the conglomerate spreads their illness to dozens of people at once. People with claustrophobia can have a panic attack just from the crowding that occurs.
How did this happen? Why is that intersection the one with so many distinct problems? There are three main reasons behind this mass blockage of people.
The first is that it connects to a hallway with no other exit. The Social Studies Hallway has one of the largest populations in the school throughout the day, and no way to exit said hallway except through the infamous intersection. Half of all people coming through the intersection come directly from the Social Studies Hallway.
The second is scheduling problems, which unfortunately is not controllable. People coming from the World Language hallway have a variety of periods after that class, including a Social Studies class. These students will try to push through the already incredible cluster of students to turn left into the Social Studies hallway. This problem is the same for anyone coming from the Media Center.
The third is the worst design choice that has the easiest fix. It’s the trash can next to the bathrooms. Its position is abhorrent, and for those that don’t understand why it’s a problem, here’s a brief explanation. The trash can is located directly next to the entrance to the bathrooms at the corner of the intersection. It’s not a big trash can, nor is it super close to the corner, but its position is still bad. Because it’s located so close to the corner, people cannot cling to the wall as they turn right coming from the front of the school. This pushes everyone in, leading to more overcrowding than is necessary.
So how can these be fixed? First, move the trash can farther from the corner. People will be able to cling to the wall with that simple fix and create less of a crowding issue. Second, (probably the most obvious) if you come from someplace other than the Social Studies hallway, it might be easier, and quite frankly faster, to use a different pathway to get to your next class. It’ll make your life easier in the long run. Another suggestion to everyone in the intersection: please be more courteous to others. Stay off your phones during that time, don’t cut in front of other people, stop bumping into me specifically etc etc. Letting others pass before you will direct traffic easier and also keep yourself from possibly being run over by 20 students trying to get to their Health class.
I’m not expecting this article to fix anything. Most of the time the intersection is just an irritating addition to deal with. But I’m hoping that this will at least make people aware of how bad the intersection actually is. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must leave this class to get trampled by forty other students.
Southview Catalyst 