Chancellors Walk

Safety concerns on Chancellors Walk

     At UNC Wilmington, the simple act of travelling to and from classes on the school’s famous Chancellor’s Walk is a practice in which all students must learn to use caution.  Often heavily trafficked with students walking, biking, or riding longboards, safety risks on the walk are many. The numerous modes of transportation inevitably lead to the occasional collision.

Students like Jerri Porter who prefer to walk to class attest to Chancellor’s Walk’s tendency to be “very, very busy.”  Pedestrians like Porter must do their best to stay out of the way of students on bikes and longboards.  Porter, who testifies to witnessing her friend get hit as well as having been almost hit by bikers and skateboarders herself, has her own method of attempting to avoid such encounters. 

“I put my headphones in so I won’t move at all and they will just dodge me,” she said.

Similarly, students who bike or longboard to class must do all they can to avoid walkers moving at much slower paces. 

“Any time between 9:30 and 1 it’s pretty crazy,” says UNCW student Nick Selgren,.

Selgren has almost collided with pedestrians on numerous occasions while longboarding on Chancellor’s Walk. 

“[People] aren’t paying attention, they’re listening to their iPods …You’re coming up from behind people and they just don’t care to look behind them before they turn,” he said.

Safety on Chancellor’s Walk has become a widely held concern for UNCW’s student body, with even an “I got hit on Chancellor’s Walk” facebook page having been created.  Many students have offered their own suggestions for making Chancellor’s Walk safer, such as urging others to stay on the right side of the walk or requesting the addition of a bike lane.

Campus Police Officer James Watson has a few proposed solutions of his own to help with this problem.  According to Officer Watson, the biggest problem is that there is no written set of rules.

“There are no written directives or laws on how people are supposed to operate, and you see the bikes and skateboarders going wherever,” said Watson.

Watson finds that texting is another distraction for students walking on campus. 

“Students would walk off a cliff and they wouldn’t even know it,” he said. 

Watson believes that something must be done overall to solve this problem, as educating new freshman every year in how to use Chancellor’s Walk has become something of a “never ending battle.”  There is a task force on campus that is currently looking into improving the walk by possibly adding a bike-only lane on the far right side to separate the wheels from the pedestrians.  However, until such measures are taken, the responsibility of safe use of Chancellor’s Walk lies entirely within the hands of the student body.

Carson Bowen: A casualty of Chancellor's Walk

Residents of Wilmington may think that South College Road and Oleander Drive are the busiest, most dangerous places in town in the middle of the day.  However, for UNC Wilmington students, Chancellor’s Walk poses just as big of a daily threat to their safety.

Each day, thousands of students traverse the brick pathway that stretches from Wagoner Dining Hall to the clock tower. Every hour, as classes let out, students pour out of various buildings onto Chancellor’s Walk like ants and head in every direction.

Chancellor’s Walk instantly becomes a collage of bikers, skateboarders and pedestrians zooming about at different speeds. With so many people heading in so many different directions, collisions are a daily occurrence and often times, the cause of nasty injuries.

UNC Wilmington student, Carson Bowen, knows first hand the dangers of not being careful while going down Chancellor’s Walk.

While taking classes at UNCW last summer, Bowen recalls a time when he was involved in a collision while heading to class.

“I was late for class so I was going a little faster than normal on my skateboard,” said Bowen, who is a sophomore Communication Studies Major.

“I was merging onto Chancellor’s and it was right when classes were getting out, so it was really busy. I just took a turn too quickly and I ended up running into another guy that was going in the opposite direction. He ended up on the ground and I ended up on the ground, and we were both hurt pretty badly.

Bowen suffered a broken wrist from that accident that required surgery, and left him in a cast for eight weeks.

“I have the scars to prove it,” he said.  It was an ordeal that made him more aware of people around him while on Chancellor’s Walk.

“I’m always checking both ways now whenever I first get on Chancellor’s,” Bowen said. “ I try to give people as much space as possible whenever I have to go around them because I know how bad the damage can be whenever you run into somebody.”

UNCW Campus Police force is constantly looking for ways to make Chancellor’s safer for students, but it’s difficult to enforce rules on something that isn’t a road.

“I think it just comes down to some people not paying attention to other people around them,” Bowen said. “It would also help if people would get their noses out of their phones while they’re walking. I see people run into others all the time just because they aren’t looking where they are going. I think that would make a huge difference and cut down on the number of crashes.”

Although Chancellor’s Walk can be dangerous, it is a main thoroughfare on UNCW’s campus. For the time being, students will just have to look both ways, and stay in their toes.