News

The Otago Daily Times has written an impassioned piece decrying the dangers of students jaywalking across Cumberland St.

The article, published in the ODT last Monday, extensively covered a complaint by a (presumably elderly) member of the public that students crossing Cumberland St while the traffic lights were green were “causing people driving south to have to dodge wayward students.”
 
This intolerable risk to traffic was slammed by local police officer Snr Sgt Aitken, who unequivocally stated that the complainant probably had a valid point.
 
The ODT’s follow-up reporting on the matter was outstanding, as they managed to obtain no evidence whatsoever that renegade student pedestrians had contributed to a higher number of crashes on the stretch of road in question, but published the article anyway.
 
They did, however, send a reporter to count the number of ‘students’ who crossed illegally during a ten minute stretch. The reporter, rumoured to have been armed with an abacus, counted seventeen people crossing without the green man in that time. That equals approximately 1.7 naughty students crossing every minute.
 
This outstanding investigative journalism spurred Critic to carry out its own inquiry, which consisted of getting reporter Lozz Holding drunk and pushing him into oncoming traffic to see if anyone would run him over and give us a great photo opportunity.
 
Unfortunately, as most cars seemed intent on swerving around the inebriated Holding, Critic had to send Critic reporter Aimee Gulliver out in her own vehicle to effect a collision. In the ten minute period whilst we waited for Gulliver to navigate the city’s pointless one-way system we counted one fat student, four seagulls, and two Tourism students talking about the new Hairy MacClary from Donaldson’s Dairy book they had to read for class last week.
 
Critic’s resident statistician then conducted a detailed and highly technical analysis of the data we collected during our experiment. The results suggested that the average sober student crossing Cumberland St without a driver intent on running them over to fill photo space in a student magazine had approximately a 0.000% chance of being hit by an irascible old person, but a 1 in 4 chance of that old person writing an angry letter to the ODT about the matter.