This article is featured in the 2026 Commencement special issue.
Every Dartmouth student knows that intersection. It’s the one that leaves you scrambling to make it to class. It’s the one that yells “Wait!” at you thirty-or-so times as your fingers turn purple pressing the button in January. It’s also the one that might be deteriorating your respiratory system every single day.
The type of intersection at Wheelock and Main Street is colloquially known as a Barnes Dance intersection, meaning all crosswalks turn green at once, prioritizing pedestrian crossing and creating a box for students to cross without fear of a turning car or a speeding bike. Barnes Dance intersections have also been reported to reduce pedestrian injuries.
The trade-off for an all-at-once pedestrian crosswalk experience is prolonged waits for every lane of traffic to cross. The wait times are so brutal that many students (myself included) have devised ways around campus that avoid interacting with the intersection altogether. For car owners and pedestrians alike, Wheelock and Main is an absolute bastardization of public infrastructure. But the science suggests that it’s more than just an annoyance: It’s an endangerment to our physical health.
Collis porch is a classic Dartmouth social hub — a site for sunny lunches with friends, club tabling events and outdoor band performances. A table during peak lunch hours is a feat of real estate acquisition, and a run-in with fewer than three friends is an anomaly. As utopic as Collis porch might seem, its proximity to the universally hellish intersection is something both students and administration should be worried about.
According to research from the University of Surrey, pollution at intersections is 29 times higher than on open roads, and at an intersection as busy and stand-still as Wheelock and Main Street, the fumes are truly abundant. Car exhaust concentrates at these intersections, spewing dangerous levels of fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, which the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies as a Group 1 carcinogen, which means that there is sufficient evidence that they cause cancer in humans.
Simply put, our staple Barnes Dance intersection is the place to be if you’re trying to develop lung cancer. At peak lunch hours, driving around campus is disastrous — students are running from class to class, and the roads are chaotic. Lunch is when I see the most traffic at the intersection. It’s also when I see the most people at Collis porch.
Traffic-induced respiratory and cardiovascular damage is endangering people across the world, and it’s not getting the attention it deserves. E-ZPass, for example, was an innovative technology that improved not only traffic flow but broader public health. People living near highways, particularly tollbooths, are at severe risk of potentially fatal respiratory illnesses. The introduction of E-ZPass reduced prematurity and low birth weight by over 10% and also reduced asthma triggers for nearby residents. Reducing prenatal exposure to pollutants from traffic congestion has the potential to reduce preterm births by up to 8,600 annually, yielding cost savings of at least $444 million per year.
It’s not just the lunch-goers of Collis porch who are potentially inhaling straight fumes for an hour a day. It’s the frisbee players on the green, the Hanover residents protesting on the corner every Friday and the family with their window open staying at the Hanover Inn. The intersection of Wheelock and Main is more than just a campus-wide annoyance. The minutes (that feel like hours) you spend waiting for the light to change are minutes you’re inhaling pollutants and endangering your health.
I won’t pretend to be a traffic engineer, and I won’t pretend to have a concrete solution to our crosswalk quandary — I don’t even have a driver’s license — but what I do know is that this intersection poses a potential health crisis on campus, and the College needs to do something about it. Perhaps there’s an alternative road worth building or a new traffic light worth installing. Whatever it may be, we need to take every precaution to stay safe. If you’re driving, roll your windows up at the intersection and turn the fan on. If you’re a pedestrian, consider walking a different route to your class in order to dodge the smog. If you’re a college president, consider launching an investigation to see if toxic levels of particulate matter, a leading cause of lung cancer, are infiltrating student lunches on Collis porch.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
