Gridlock Around CSI: Catch 22

It's 6:15; your 4:40 class has let out early. Fantastic. Now it's time to make a mad dash to your car in order to preempt CSI's infamous gridlock.

But you're not alone. Thousands of other students have the same idea, and they're powerwalking harder than a Ft. Lauderdale granny. Inside your head, a debate rages: if you walk normally, those five extra minutes your godlike professor has blessed you with will be wasted. You'll certainly be mired in the sea of tail lights and exhaust fumes.

If you step your game up a bit, you've got a shot to get off campus before that ditz in the blue Civic. Look at her, wearing those ridiculous bug-eye sunglasses even though it's already dark out. You really want to lose to her?

Or you could go all out, appearances be damned. Usain Bolt would be proud, gazing upon your majestic form sprint across two lawns and half a parking lot to reach your ride.

There's no time to waste. After you finally reach your vehicle, hurl your books into your passenger seat, assuming you don't have a passenger. Do it anyway if you have one. Call it collateral damage, an understood risk your companion accepted when they asked for a ride. A few papercuts and a bloody nose are worth it if you don't get caught in gridlock.

Except that, no matter how quickly you move, or how aggressively you leave your parking spot, you'll still be forced to wait in the queue. Take your pick of exits: Forest Hill, Victory, or even that semi-secret exit between 2R and the gravel lot. None is any better than the others.

So what is to be done? More exits, you say? More peace officers and NYPD Traffic to regulate the flow? A double-lane Campus Drive? This is madness!

Yes. But this is also Staten Island.

The fact of the matter is that, despite any advances the administration could make within the campus grounds, they can't fix the main problem: the outlying streets. Victory Boulevard is one of the island's main arteries, granting access to much of the mid-island and North shore areas in addition to thruways to Brooklyn and Jersey. It's going to be crowded for the majority of the day, every day.

Many students know that though, so they try to go out the "back door": Forest Hill. The problem with that area is that the City of New York obviously never expected or accounted for the ludicrous density of traffic the area sees these days. So there's one lane going off campus to one lane on Forest Hill Road for thousands of cars attempting to vacate the premises.

The road runs as only a single lane down to Richmond Avenue, two miles from campus. That's a long way to send a few thousand cars at rush hour. Naturally, the intersection of Forest Hill Avenue and Rockland Avenue exacerbates the problem; it's not a three-way light, despite the intersection's popularity as a cross-street for students heading towards Bay Terrace and New Dorp. The queue backs up farther and farther, and quite quickly the small Forest Hill exit is overwhelmed. And you wondered why it takes nearly half an hour to get off campus that way.

The tertiary exit is only open after 4:40, so it's a no go if you're looking to leave during the noon - two PM rush. It leaves you on Willowbrook Road, which is only really useful if you live in Emerson or Todt Hill. However, you can also construct a route to West Brighton from that exit, so long as you know how far down Slosson Avenue runs and what it intersects with. Take Slosson down to Martling, and cut across to Clove Road. If you're lucky you'll avoid a hell of a lot of traffic that way.

But if you're part of the majority who use the other two exits, what are you to do? Does Navigator Vincent have a magical route for you?

Nope. We're all screwed. Staten Island is overpopulated, and CSI is over-enrolled. Gridlock is just a side effect, folks. Time to blow up some cars. Anyone got a rocket launcher?