THE DAILY TARGUM
Volume 141, Number 56
S E R V I N G
T H E
R U T G E R S
C O M M U N I T Y
S I N C E
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 18, 2009
1 8 6 9
Today: Partly cloudy
EASY AS PIE
High: 55 • Low: 42
After opening the season with a home loss to No. 2 Stanford, the Rutgers women’s basketball team trampled Kean 85-49 behind 20 points from senior guard Brittany Ray.
City crashes into course of action for pedestrian safety BY CHRIS ZAWISTOWSKI STAFF WRITER
JOVELLE TAMAYO/ STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Pedestrian fatalities continue to rise throughout New Jersey, a 33 percent increase since 2008. The city recently received a grant to improve crosswalks and traffic signs. Once construction is complete, police officers will enforce traffic rules at designated locations.
INDEX UNIVERSITY The University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics released a poll showing that 47 percent of voters foresee a particularly taxing obstacle for Chris Christie.
OPINIONS Both celebrities and everyday people alike are feeling the heat from libel suits filed because of statements made on the social media site, Twitter. UNIVERSITY . . . . . . . 3
BY JOHN S. CLYDE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Some club sports at the University come with a steep price tag. Students on the A Division of the men’s club hockey team pay about $1,900 in fees, Director of Recreation Stephan Pappas said. “Some club members have decided that it might be too expensive to sustain so they back out, or they come to the first couple of meetings and then they find out what the dues are, and then they decide not to come back,” Pappas said. In response, the Rutgers University Student Assembly Allocations Board is in the preliminary stages of forming a
committee to address the matter and to consider the possibility of club team funding through RUSA Allocations instead of Recreation. “There is going to be a committee created to look at [RUSA] Allocations’ guidelines and funding,” RUSA Allocations Chair Shayna Davis said. Nothing has been decided on whether to raise the student fee, but RUSA Allocations is starting to form a committee to discuss having a campus-wide referendum to raise the student fee, Davis said. The $71 student fee is split among the School of Arts and Sciences, professional schools, special programs,
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University club teams, like the men’s club hockey team, pictured above, may be losing members because of expensive dues. The RUSA Allocations Board is looking into ways to increase funding for club sports and other student organizations.
Lack of NextBus signs yields student frustration BY COLLEEN ROACHE
OPINIONS . . . . . . . . 8
CLASSIFIEDS . . . . . . 12
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Club sports overdue for funding changes
CORRESPONDENT
DIVERSIONS . . . . . . 10
With the number of fatal pedestrian accidents rising in New Jersey, the city is coming up with new ways to ensure pedestrian safety. “Pedestrian safety is a major issue lately because traffic fatalities have come down on a statewide level, motorcycle and bicycle fatalities are about the same and pedestrian fatalities are spiked way up,” said Bill Neary, executive director of Keep Middlesex Moving, a non-profit transportation management association. In New Jersey alone, more than 135 people were killed last year in pedestrian accidents, according to the U.S. Department of Transpor tation’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System. This number will remain high in 2009. A national study by Transportation for America repor ts 121 pedestrians have been killed in traffic collisions alone this year, a 33 percent increase over the same period in 2008. Because of these figures, Neary said Gov. Jon S. Corzine’s administration has invested millions of dollars in pedestrian safety programs. New Brunswick has been a beneficiary of this increase in funding. More than a year ago, the city was awarded $476,000 in grants from the New Jersey Department of Transportation to help fund improvements to pedestrian crossing areas and police enforcement efforts surrounding the New Brunswick train station and the Robeson, Lincoln,
Roosevelt and Lord Sterling schools, City Spokesman Bill Bray said. With the funding, the city has installed radar-activated speed limit signs and a number of in-street traffic safety signs with messages like “slow down for pedestrians,” which will help ensure drivers are following the speed limit laws and yielding to pedestrians, Bray said. The city is using the grant money to stripe crosswalks and make curb improvements, replacing some less visible, antiquated slate curbing and painting them to keep drivers from parking too close to an intersection, he said. “This opens up the intersection and opens up the lines of sight [for drivers],” Bray said. He is unsure of what construction has taken place already. Once all the construction is done, targeted enforcement will be placed in the areas by police officers to make sure traffic rules are followed, he said. “[They will be] hitting drivers with tickets and violations when they fail to yield to pedestrians, fail to stop at stop signs or are speeding,” Bray said. Projects are also planned around the train station area, including a kiss and ride facility in front of the train station, where motorists can drop off and pick people up, Bray said. But these projects have been delayed because the city is prioritizing the construction of the Gateway Center, and the question of reengineering where taxi stands and bike racks needs to be addressed, he said.
Without a vehicle to travel between campuses, the average student is at the mercy of the University bus system. NextBus GPS aims to make trips a bit easier, but the lack of the system at the Livingston Student Center has often left those going to and from Livingston campus in the dark. “It would be really useful if there were a NextBus sign over here,” said Avantika Khullar, a Rutgers College senior. “I remember when the buses used to come in here and there were signs.”
Khullar, who was waiting for an LX bus to travel back to College Avenue after a class, said the system would be most helpful to those who travel to the Cook/Douglass campuses and need the REXL, which arrives on Livingston less frequently. Katherine Germak travels on the REXL bus to get from her residence hall on Douglass to a class on Livingston. She said she is often frustrated with the bus to the campus. “The REXLs don’t come often enough,” said Germak, a School of Arts and Sciences junior. “It’s a huge problem … an L [bus] will pass, an LX [bus] will pass [and] I have to wait 25 minutes for a REXL [bus].”
She said improvements at the student center may help, but NextBus is usually wrong and the bus system needs reform. Many students are unaware of the recent improvements. The University Department of Transportation has installed two LED screens in the lobby of the student center to replace the screen that was in place prior to the center’s construction, said Jack Molenaar, director of the University Department of Transportation Services. The new flat-screen monitors connect to the Internet and incur a one-time cost, unlike the former screens that
SEE SIGNS ON PAGE 4
Students with only 0 credits can register for Spring 2010 classes tonight from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.