Dear Concord Drivers,

Learn to drive. I’ve never been to a random suburban town in Massachusetts where people drive worse than you do. I mean sure, Concord is a historic town that draws visitors from all over the United States for its Revolutionary War history, but there is no valid reason to barrel through downtown like the Red Coats are chasing you. 

Not long ago, I was waiting to cross the street from in front of the Concord Public Library towards downtown. There I stood under a “State Law: Stop for Pedestrians in Crosswalk” sign for five minutes while driver after driver made eye contact with me and then proceeded to speed through the crosswalk. There’s really no excuse for this. Nothing is obstructing a driver’s view of the crosswalk. You just choose to get on with your very busy and important life instead of waiting thirty seconds for me to cross the street. Keep in mind, if you hit me with your car both of us are going to be running a whole lot later than we were before.

Let’s take the other week for example. There I was, around mid-day, walking back from Dunkin’. As I waited to cross the street, the driver of a public school mini-bus looked me dead in the eye as he sped through the crosswalk. Like, aren’t you literally driving around children? Isn’t valuing safety part of your job description?

In your defense, there are some pretty bad intersections in Concord and the poorly parallel parked cars on both sides of the street don’t exactly help with visibility. But what about when you’re pulling out of the Main School driveway, driving really slow to merge back into traffic, making eye contact with a Concord Academy student, and pulling just far enough forward to block both sides of the sidewalk completely? The odds are, you just dropped your own child off at CA and here you are blocking their classmates from getting to school on time.

Boston-area drivers are known to be pretty aggressive, I get that. But in front of CA, where the pedestrians are probably people you know or might know in the future, this sort of aggressive behavior seems like a terrible idea. So, to the people of CA: please tell your parents to drive better. We would all prefer not to get hit by a car most days.

Sincerely,

Simon Glassenberg ’24