Document-Based Essay_AP English Language 3

The population of skateboarding, which is currently cutting a conspicuous figure, is reflected in the number of skateboarders across the country that has gone up 128 percent over the past ten years. On the contrary, complains about skaters who continue to use public and private parking lots, business plazas, streets, and sidewalks has risen as a serious conflict between the skateboarders and citizens. (Source A) The skateboard riders “skate in the streets, at apartment complexes and shopping centers” (Source F), and continuously collide with the citizens using the public facilities.

Skateboard riders should not enjoy their sports to the extent of infringing the rights of other street users, they “shall yield the right-of-way to pedestrians, and shall yield the right-of-way to motor vehicles when approaching or crossing a driveway.” (Source C) Whenever a skateboard rider falls down and “scratch pretty marble ledges” or “hit a pedestrian”, the “punks and vagrants of society” become “criminals” for putting the society into a disorder. (Source B)

Skateboarding on the streets or any undefined public places harms society, making the directors and officials of the parks to “get up from behind their desks and bother to come to the area.” “Graffiti has increased dramatically” since the time that the department approved the skateboard riders to freely paint and mark their temporary park. It is just like when a parent “take a child and sit him in front of wall and tell him that this is the only place he can draw.” Moreover, other facilities are easily destroyed, such as windows, parking decks, even elevator shafts. For the “safety and security of the area”, the city officials should “clearly see the problems that exist.” (Source D)

Conflicts made between the skateboard riders and property and business owners are also serious problems to be considered, because “skaters often occupy transitional spaces that are neither exclusively public nor private, generating hostility.” The tensions grow bigger and bigger due to many cities responding them by “enlisting law enforcement to regulate skateboarding” while skaters still “occupy urban space without engaging in economic activity like the homeless.” This problem finally gets to the point of “adding spikes or bumps to handrails or ledges or placing chains across ditches and steps to render them unusable for skating” as a method to fight with the poor treatment. (Source A)