The Clean Air Corridor is pointless

It’s been a month with the new Clean Air Corridor in effect, and I feel pretty safe in saying it’s accomplished nothing.

First, can we drop any pretense of it being about emissions as well as smoking? The only people who ever drive in the Park Blocks are cops and university staff. They definitely haven’t stopped driving in the Park Blocks, and didn’t do it frequently enough to warrant any kind of action. Also, what about the big, diesel-guzzling delivery trucks that park next to the loading dock at Smith Memorial Student Union and leave their engines running?

Now that that’s out of the way, there hasn’t been a significant decrease in the number of people who smoke between the buildings or other spots in the Park Blocks. There’s no enforcement of the rules happening at all. Personally, that doesn’t bother me a whole lot. I can’t say I enjoy walking through clouds of smoke between classes, but it’s not such a big deal that I think some kind of action should be taken.

But apparently enough people did think it was a big deal, and the CAC was instated. Shouldn’t we find a way to actually address the problem? If enough people have an issue with smoking that they want to ban it, then it should be put to the campus to decide on in some meaningful way.

The way Portland State originally put the idea to us (a poll sent out via email last year) didn’t offer any solutions. Its options were basically ban it, allow it and I don’t know. There are definitely better ways of dealing with the issue than an outright ban, and I’m sure a lot of the school feels the same. When only 4,000 people at a 30,000 person campus replied to your survey, it’s probably not fair to make a policy based on it.

As I’ve said before, why not designate specific smoking areas, and design them to be more capable of filtering the smoke away? The Dialogue Dome is still a good example of this. The smoke goes into the roof and gets filtered out, and the way it’s sheltered keeps the wind from blowing too much smoke into areas people usually walk in.

Or if people are seriously adamant about banning smoking, then let’s do something like what the University of Oregon did and offer better and more accessible smoking cessation programs at the same time we’re banning it. It’s one thing to help people quit; it’s another thing entirely to ban smoking simply because we don’t like it.

If we’re going to take a step like this, let’s be smart about it and put a little thought and care into it. Banning smoking for the sake of banning it is pointless. The goal should be to help people rather than forcing them to take their smoke break somewhere else.

The CAC is more of the same pseudo-sustainability that’s way too common at PSU. It has no actual effect besides letting the university throw out a few more self-glorifying press releases, allowing everyone involved to pat themselves on the back for how eco-friendly they are. Let’s stop doing that.

Let’s get rid of the Clean Air Corridor (or leave it, I guess, since it’s not even enforced anyway) and have some public forums or other kinds of events that will allow people to actually make themselves heard about the issue. Let’s do something that involves more than some announcements and new signs put up.

Everyone knows smoking is bad. You know it, I know it, Don Draper knows it. No one is ever going to dispute that fact—it’s not 1950 anymore. But there has to a more productive and effective way of addressing it than what we’re doing now.